Jumanji

Siblings Judy and Peter find a dusty jungle themed board game abandoned in the park, and a printed warning on the box, that once a game of Jumanji has started it will not be over until one player reaches the Golden City, turns out to be literal rather than decorative. Each roll of the dice brings the game's next event crashing into their actual house: a lion appears on the piano, monkeys ransack the kitchen, a monsoon floods the living room, a tsetse fly threatens Peter with sleeping sickness, a herd of rhinoceroses stampedes through, and a python coils itself around the fireplace. Judy finally rolls a twelve, reaches the Golden City, and everything, animals, flood, and all, vanishes as suddenly as it arrived; the two children return the game to the park bench where they found it before their parents get home from the opera, saying nothing about what happened. The book's last page shows two neighborhood boys discovering the same box on the same bench, one of them already starting to read the instructions aloud, and closes there.

Chris Van Allsburg draws the entire book in detailed pencil, working in black and white with dramatic, theatrical lighting and unusual low or tilted vantage points that make an ordinary, familiar living room feel genuinely unstable once a rhinoceros is standing in it. Nothing in the art is fantastical in style, only in content, which is much of what makes the invasions land as unsettling rather than cartoonish.

Read aloud, the escalating, one disaster per dice roll structure gives the book real suspense, and children tend to start predicting or hoping for the next animal well before it arrives; it suits six through ten year olds, with the monsoon and the python enough to unsettle a more anxious four or five year old at bedtime.