The Atheneum

"...at its best, lucid and unassuming writing delivers thoughtful, intelligent content is ultimately the purpose of reading. This is what Trevor Newland does in The Atheneum, a stylishly illustrated and extraordinarily intelligent work of Children's Literature that really is, as the biographical page indicates, a story "for young AND old people. . . . All of this is to say that if I were a young reader I'd be drawn to Newland's enigmatic illustrations because they communicate the power of the written word—and drawn picture—to transport us, by the seeming magic medium of reading, to an unbounded world of the imagination. Isn't that exactly what younger readers crave? . . . I'm an older reader, however, and what I found remarkable about The Atheneum is the simple premise underlying Jack's quest, which is that our sense of identity—our "voice"—is not something inside of us just waiting to be released but is to a great extent the effect of reading." — Peter Babiak, The British Columbia Review