Cities in Layers is a picture book that takes you backward in time through six cities and with tiny details and a page full of annotations to find and wonder at for each stop along the way. To add to the fun, the top layer (always roughly the present) has two cutouts letting you see through to the city of the past, because that part of the city lasted through into the future. Turning the page shows the city at an earlier time, anywhere from a hundred to several hundred years ago, and again you can peep through a window into yet an earlier time. A final page shows an even older city, hundreds or even a thousand years old, but still recognizable and with its own set of locations to identify.
I admit that I got a bit frustrated with locating all the landmarks. I'm just stubborn enough to insist on finding them all (although I never did find one of 1880 London's poor districts) but also not visually acute enough to make this easy. Sometimes they skipped around a bit arbitrarily. I really wished for a bright elementary school kid to turn the task over to, and I've known a lot who would have really enjoyed this and been much better at it. And I felt the cut-outs weren't always used to best advantage; sometimes they were amazing from the front and back, but sometimes the second reveal was just part of a lake or something. I realize that reality constrained some of the choices so this is probably an unreasonable complaint, but hey, if the problem was with reality and not Steele and Lozano is that my fault?
The pages are stiff enough to be durable, even with the holes cut out, and the art work is cheerful and detailed but doesn't make me reach for a magnifying glass, so a very finely done balance. I really like how the book works on several levels -- it's a great travelogue for six major world cities, it presents the idea of history in a very understanded but powerful way, and it's a fun game for detail-oriented kids to solve by finding every location. The concept that these cities have been around for so much time, adjusting to changing political, technological, and even climatic conditions is fascinating, but so are the pictures themselves and the different buildings, walls, castles, and rivers to identify.
This would be a great gift for a kid going on a trip to any of these cities; if the parent doesn't mind the extra weight it would be a fun time-killer on the travel part of the trip as well as including the kid in the planning and expectations of the destination. Kids who live in one of the names places would have extra delight in finding some of the locations both on the page and in real life; I can definitely see these on the shelves of my New York cousins. And even children who don't expect to see the streets in real life will enjoy visiting them through this book and turning the pages to see how they changed over the years but kept some of the old monuments and streets while adjusting others to new conditions.
As soon as I'm allowed to see other people I think I'll pass this along to a local elementary school. I can see it fitting in the library's section of things to do on a rainy day as well as just being a rich resource for geography lessons.
Thanks to Candlewick Press for sending me a review copy of this book.
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