As Mark Darden’s picture book ELIJAH GOES TO CLEVELAND begins, our hero’s parents are driving him to his grandparents’ house in Cleveland. Once there, Elijah sees an announcement on TV that his favorite band, The Gateway Escape, is holding a contest by which fans may win free tickets to their concert that night. To win, entrants must visit various spots around the city and try to find individual members of the band at each one. He and his grandparents set off to try their luck (leaving Mom and Dad behind to relax.)
The book works well as a travelogue, with stops at Cleveland’s Public Square, its West Side marketplace, the Cleveland Museum of Art and, of course, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The author also mentions (though doesn’t describe) a few other sites, including the city’s Metroparks Zoo and Lake Erie-adjacent Edgewater Park. The result is to cheerfully and convincingly make the case for Ohio’s merits as a fun place for families to visit. However, the story doesn’t impart any other lessons to young readers, nor does it reveal any surprises or provide any interesting variations
The characters make for appealing guides to Cleveland. Elijah, in his excitement about going to his grandparents’ house and good humor about spending an afternoon with them, models good behavior of which any parent or (especially) grandparent would approve. However, the characters’ personalities aren’t developed with any specificity, besides Elijah’s enthusiasm for The Gateway Escape and Grandpa’s for cupcakes. If Elijah had been at all reluctant to either visit Cleveland, sometimes (if unfairly) viewed as a less than exciting destination, or spend time with his grandparents rather than with his friends, there might have been some dramatic tension while the story was underway, and a useful takeaway for young readers once the story was complete.
Anh Bui’s illustrations are a major asset, making the otherwise thin characters into distinctive and appealing protagonists, and Cleveland into a cheerful playground for a young boy and his grandparents to spend an afternoon in. Deft and unfussy images convey a vivid sense of each location visited by the characters through a minimum of detail, rendered with elegantly simple brushwork sometimes redolent of Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline illustrations. The quality of the illustration’s reproduction in the book, unfortunately, leaves something to be desired, as shown by the out-of-focus lettering on the book’s title page. The text also has problems, namely in the form of typos, some but not all of which were identified, by a note included with the review copy, as areas for correction in later editions.
Mark Darden’s picture book ELIJAH GOES TO CLEVELAND is an appealing showcase for the Ohio city and for the talents of illustrator Anh Bui, though a one-note story and one-dimensional characters hold the story back from achieving its full potential.
~Everett Jones for IndieReader