My favourite picture-book of all time is Simon & the Wind. The writing in it awes me. In that little book, Tibo manages to define, for me at least, one of the most important aspects of the human condition. In 270 words, more or less, he does what I, in a 75,000-word novel, quail at hoping to achieve. And so, when I was asked to review Simon Finds a Treasure, I waited for it with great excitement.

In this, the ninth Simon book, our hero goes on a quest for treasure and eventually finds that he has had it all along.

"Is that all?" I hear you asking. "Isn't that what Dorothy found in The Wizard of Oz? And then there's.. And.. And what about.?"

Me, too. Been there, read that. Sigh.

Besides, we've already got too many books where the hero goes out and asks help from various men and beasts, all of whom have their own equivalent of whatever the hero seeks, and none of whom can teach the hero the thing he must learn for himself.

It gets worse. I didn't believe in the story. I could believe that a young boy could imagine signs to treasure. I could imagine him finding a cave and scaring himself into thinking he saw a ghost, but I drew the line at believing that he could come out of the cave into the darkness only to be rescued by his friends, all children like himself. No adults, though he'd been gone for hours, long into the night. All those kids out there, and no way, no way at all, for them to know where he had gone. So how did they find him? And come on, Gilles, where are all the parents who'd have something to say about their little kids out there without adult help in the dark?

Tibo's illustrations are consistent with those in his other books: sensuously gorgeous colour-washed backgrounds that might almost have been computer-generated, combined with delicately drawn and perfectly rendered birds and flowers in the foreground, all overwhelmed by a bulgily-bodied Simon, whose face looks as if it's been planed out of wood. And always those two dots of eyes, a curve for a nose, and a circle of a mouth that now and then makes a smiling arc. Nowhere in any of the Simon books I've seen does a child have a profile. The style does put us immediately in the world of a child's imagination, where a wooden rocking-horse's wheels can eventually become hooves. I can even be persuaded to accept Simon's face, if the words do it for me.

Unfortunately, these didn't. 

Welwyn Wilton Katz is a writer and editor living in London, Ontario. Her latest novel for children, Out of the Dark, won the Ruth Schwartz Award.