“ incorporates simple and telling details-real and imaginary-into his rich and sophisticated art. Madlenka journeys through these mystical places, too, and it is these surreal, wordless stories-within-the-story that will excite a wide range of children, launching them in their own imagined departures.” - Booklist, Boxed Review The real magic comes in the cleverly cut-away windows in each storefront through which children glimpse complex, global dreamscapes. When Madlenka returns home and tells her parents that she ‘went all around the world,' readers will feel that they, too, have been armchair travelers, delivered safely home in Sís's capable hands.” - Publishers Weekly “As he did with Tibet Through the Red Box, Sís takes readers to exotic lands, yet continues to bring them back to the comfort of what they know. A book to be read slowly and repeatedly.” - The New York Times Book Review The book's design is ingenious, a kind of two-dimensional hypertext of maps and windows that allows you to flip from the cartography of real places to a geography of pure imagination. Her adventure is perfectly ordinary and completely magical, like the wonderful, scary experience of losing a tooth. “For Madlenka, who has just discovered that she has a loose tooth, the block is a world unto itself, a familiar, self-contained place and also a realm of infinite newness and variety, always reassuringly the same and yet constantly changing its shape, color and texture. Peter Sís lives in the New York City area with his wife and children. This award is considered the most prestigious in international children's literature, given biennially by the International Board on Books for Young People. Peter won the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Award.

He was chosen to deliver the 2012 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture for the Association for Library Service to Children. In addition, Peter Sís is the first children’s book illustrator to win the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Peter's books, Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei, T ibet through the Red Box, and The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain were all named Caldecott Honor books by the American Library Association. Peter is a seven-time winner of The New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year, a two-time Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honoree, and has won the Society of Illustrators Gold Medal twice. He was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and attended the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague and the Royal College of Art in London. Peter Sís is an internationally acclaimed illustrator, author, and filmmaker.

Madlenka by Peter Sís