By Trolley Past Thimbledon Bridge

Once upon a time, artist Marvin Bileck was asked to illustrate a children’s book written by the esteemed Virginia Woolf. While that collaboration was never completed, Bileck so loved what he had started that he instead began working with writer (and friend) Ashley Bryan to breathe a different kind of life into his initial drawings. The result comes to us as By Trolley Past Thimbledon Bridge, a picture book that is sure to delight children and adults alike. Don’t look for a coherent story here. Instead, this book consists of whimsical prose that is all loosely connected by the theme of Thimbledon Land. There are really only two pages of text here, where the various lines of prose are collected in one place. Most of the book consists of Bileck’s beautiful artwork, full of bright colors, fantastical structures, an assortment of human characters, and a menagerie of animals. Lines of prose are scattered among the illustrations, which will dazzle the eyes and stimulate the imagination. By Trolley Past Thimbledon Bridge has literally been decades in the making, but this beautiful picture book has been completely worth the wait.