Zoom by Istvan Banyai

Zoom
Istvan Banyai
Penguin Books
1995

What a fun book to read...er...not read.  Zoom is a picture book that does just that - repeatedly zooms.  Each image turns into another image on the next page.  And amazingly the image on the last page is completely different from the image on the first page, but if you "read" the entire book, there is a storyline there, and it's great.
This book was recommended to me by one of the elementary para-librarians that works in our district.  I took it home this weekend intending to read it on my own time, but some precious, unexpected time with my 7-year-old niece came up on Saturday, so I decided to read it with her.  Not knowing what I was getting myself into, I decided to make reading Zoom a game.  Once I figured out how the book worked, we would look at the page and look for clues as to what the next image would be.  Sometimes we were right, other times we were way off.
What I found in exploring the book with my niece is that her ideas of what would come next were worlds away from mine.  While many of my ideas were right or pretty close, her's were fun.  She simply ignored the obvious hints and made up her own fun ideas.
How I wish I could be seven again...

If you're looking for a trippy webpage that gives a great preview of the book, visit Istvan Banyai's homepage (linked above).  Wow.