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From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)

When Peter Sis was a child in Prague, his father, Vladimir, traveled to Tibet as a documentary filmmaker and became stranded in that mysterious country. His family did not know what had happened to him, and for the boy Peter a sense of absence marked the time that followed. It is not clear how long it was until his father's return--was he gone for more than one Christmas, or did one Christmas without his presence make an indelible impression that shadows Sís's memories of other childhood holidays? In Tibet: Through the Red Box, Peter Sís weaves his own dreamlike memories into a book that also imagines the details of his father's experiences in Tibet during the time he was missing from young Peter's life. On a trek across Tibet in search of a means to return home, the father's journey as chronicled in a diary is no less dreamlike than the son's own memories as he experiences the extraordinary nature of that mystical place and travels toward the forbidden city of Lhasa ever more intent on warning the young Dalai Lama of the inevitable, tragic changes he senses the approaching Chinese will bring. The adult Peter Sís is both character in and creator of this unique artistic and literary journey that gracefully blurs the lines between fact and dream. Summoned by his father to his childhood home, Sís reads his father's diairies and is transported back to his own childhood and into his missing father's life, in the process finally filling the hole that the older man's absence had left during that time. The mystical quality of the narrative is echoed in the multilayered artwork, which is filled with details inspired by Tibetan culture and cast in deep, ever-changing hues. (Age 11 and older)

CCBC Choices 1998 © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 1998. Used with permission.

From Horn Book

January 1, 1999
This mystical, mysterious picture book tells of the artist's father's journey to Tibet in the 1950s, the stories he told upon his return, and the adult Peter's response to his father's diaries of the trip. Although the book contains no notes to sort story from myth, it details a quest made convincing, paradoxically, by both text's and pictures' matter-of-fact acceptance of the magical.

(Copyright 1999 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

From Publisher's Weekly

Starred review from November 2, 1998
In this visually enticing, magically appealing, oversized volume, Czechoslovakian-born illustrator Sis applies his considerable gifts to painting a spellbinding portrait of his father's experiences in Tibet, where he was sent in the 1950s to instruct the Chinese in documentary filmmaking. Vladimir Sis was actually drafted by the Chinese government to record the construction of a highway from China into Tibet; he was to be gone more than two years, unable to communicate with his family. During that time, China invaded the neighboring country, and Sis senior witnessed events he dared not describe even after he returned home, except through "magical stories" he related to his son. The diary he kept during his sojourn in Tibet was locked in a red box, which his son only saw for the first time in 1994, when he received a cryptic message from his father: "The diary is now yours." Here Sis re-creates a facsimile of the diary with excerpts handwritten upon parchment-like backgrounds on double-page spreads brimming with pencil sketches of the events described (e.g., "The road looks like a cut into a beautiful cake"). He then magnifies the more uncanny aspects of the journal via the tales told to him by his father, recollected from childhood, which are printed on the succeeding spread. One entry describes a boy wearing bells who tracks down the filmmaker in the middle of nowhere to deliver a letter from his family; Sis then follows with "The Jingle-Bell Boy," festooning the account with a trail of rhododendron-leaf markings that lead his father ultimately to the Dalai Lama. The guileless prose of both father and son makes Sis's juxtaposition of the journal records with his own childhood memories all the more poignant. The luminous colors of the artwork, the panoramas of Tibetan topography and the meticulous intermingling of captivating details and the mystical aspects of Tibetan culture make this an extraordinary volume that will appeal to readers of all ages. Author tour.

From School Library Journal

October 1, 1998
Gr 7 Up-Through personal memories, old tales, and intriguing pictures, Sis opens a door to the little-known land and religion of Tibet. There is a room, a study, in a house in Prague where a red box waits to be opened. It holds a diary of a long ago journey to Tibet made by the author's filmmaker father, sent to record the building of the first road from Communist China into the high mountains of Tibet. The room appears again and again, suffused with the colors of memory. Throughout the book are small sketches and large landscapes, and handwritten diary pages on yellowed sheets with the texture of parchment. Similar in structure and art style to Sis's The Three Golden Keys (Doubleday, 1994), this book is more solidly grounded in the reality of an adventurous journey to central Asia. Then, like a nest of boxes, it reveals layers of memory, tales of Tibet and, finally, references to the present era of political oppression and the hopes that rest on the singular figure of the Dalai Lama. Most intriguing are the eight full-page illustrations inspired by circular, symmetrical patterns and detailed symbols of the Tibetan wheel of life, creatively adapted to the text. Who will venture to study and decipher this artful book with its postmodern structure, its mysterious figures, and its interweaving of past and future? Adults will see the book as a way to introduce children to the geography, culture, and religion of Tibet. Attentive young people will be drawn to puzzle out the meaning of the stories and pictures. Art-conscious readers of all ages will appreciate the author's groundbreaking, creative use of the picture-book format in ways that challenge both eye and mind.-Shirley Wilton, Ocean County College, Toms River, NJ

From Booklist

September 15, 1998
Sis is best known as the illustrator of such notable children's books as "Starry Messenger" (1996), a Caldecott Honor Book. This book, too, has much that will appeal to the young reader, but its mix of biography, magic realism, and intricate artwork exudes a sophistication that takes it beyond the borders of Sis' usual audience. When Sis opens the red lacquered box that has sat on his father's table for decades, he finds the diary his father kept when he was lost in Tibet in the mid-1950s. The text replicates the diary's spidery handwriting, while the illustrations depict elaborate mazes and mandalas, along with dreamlike spreads that are filled with fragmented details of the father's and son's lives. As the story of the elder Sis' journey into the heart of Tibet unfolds, with its magical messengers, Yeti and a Boy-God-King, Sis begins to come to terms with what the loss of his father for that time meant to him, then and always. This is not a book that's easy to describe. Each element folds into the other and blends, then changing shape, like a kaleidoscope. Impeccably designed and beautifully made, the book has a dreamlike quality that will keep readers of many ages coming back to find more in its pages. ((Reviewed September 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)

From Library Journal

July 1, 1998
The noted illustrator/storyteller recounts his father's two years trapped in Tibet.