Caroline Mageri’s 2025 picture book Nop is at once new and familiar.
The core story–a stuffed teddy bear (Nop) has grown worn and scruffy with time, and he doesn’t seem to fit anywhere–will sound familiar, even overly familiar to picture book readers. I immediately thought of Corduroy and The Velveteen Rabbit, and I know there are others. I was prepared to snooze.
However…I was wrong. Nop’s general situation and forlorn posture were familiar, but almost immediately Mageri departs from the known. Some of this is the book’s language, which flows more like free verse than the careful prose or rhyme common to picture books. It is also more inventive, as Nop watches “crumbhawks” from his place in “Oddmint’s Dumporeum.”
More of the newness comes, though, from the art and the ending. The art is like a depressed Impressionist painted a graphic novel: it is all light and blurs and sadness. It’s the kind of picture book you want to slide your fingers across.
And the story too took an unexpected turn, both in how Nop finds a new home and who he ends up living with.
A pleasure. I’ll look for more by Mageri.
