In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown

But Gary only manages to render her in shades of taupe. Her sentences are strictly utilitarian. (“Margaret and Gratz had seen little of each other over the past few years, and they enjoyed the time together.”) Her early pages are teeming with dead-end digressions. They’re also packed with descriptions of décor and menus — the plastic-foam peanuts authors sometimes toss into a story to show more give it volume, without realizing that they’re adding no weight.

Far more baffling — criminal, actually — is that Brown’s voice is absent, entirely, from “In the Great Green Room” until the final page. show less