by Moe Zilla

Created on: May 30, 2010

"I'm late! I'm late, but it's not my fault."

A little boy opens the door to his classroom - the sunlight streaming in from outside, along with some leaves blown by the wind. His teacher looks at him skeptically from behind her spectacles, but the boy explains how the wind tore laundry from his mother's clothesline and blew it into the trees. "I climbed tree after tree and tossed clothes down until, 'Hurry,' Mom said. 'You'll be late.'" But then when the boy hurried down the street, the wind started plucking dandelions up out of the grass, and heaping them up in his way.

It's one of many great illustrations in the book, showing the boy wincing and spreading his fingers in out front of him to try to protect himself from all the pelting dandelions. The sunny-yellow missiles dot the blue sky, passing by purple shadows of a building and a storefront that's bright green. The boy's wearing a red scarf, so the picture is filled with lots of colors, and only the dandelions are drawn with extra realistic detail, showing that they're really just soft yellow petals. "The wind blew and the golden hill grew," the boy complains - but his teacher isn't buying it.

"A hill of dandelions? Now, really…"

The teacher's responses are always written in orange ink, and the rest of the text is the boy's first-person account. ("It's true! I climbed that dandelion mountain, but then something fell at my feet. The post office flag was flapping so hard its stars fluttered down to the sidewalk…") It seems like another ridiculous boy's tall tale, with each magical whopper being faithfully drawn out in full color by the book's illustrator. But the combination is a lot of fun. ("Traffic signs began flying! The wind jumbled them, then dropped them in spots where they were never meant to be.")

Illustrator Vincent Nguyen is part of the art department behind the movies "Ice Age" and "Robots", according to the book's jacket, so he knows how to make crazy situations look believable. (He even began his artistic career drawing dinosaurs and superheroes.) For "Whoosh Went the Wind," he creates a click look using acrylic paint, and charcoal pencils lets him shade the pictures with a bright but simple color scheme. And author Sally Derby keeps supplying him with even sillier things to draw. But she saves the best surprise for the book's last page.

The boy's skeptical teacher sticks her head out the window - and she's blown away by the powerful wind!

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