The Wonderful Attic of Dreams

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Carolina Smith

Some children's books are forgotten the moment you close them. And then there are the ones that somehow make their way into the part of your memory where the good stuff lives. The Wonderful Attic of Dreams is stubbornly, joyfully the latter. Ebenezer O. Makinde wrote something here that doesn't just entertain children, it gives both kids and the adults reading aloud permission to want things wildly and without apology.

Reading it out loud, which is really the only honest way to experience it, feels like something loosens in the room. There's a particular kind of delight that happens when a child's face shifts from listening to genuinely imagining, and this book has a talent for triggering exactly that. For the grown-up holding it, there's something else going on too, a quiet recognition of how long it's been since you let yourself dream without immediately editing the dream down to something reasonable.

The heart of the book is imagination as a birthright, not a phase to grow out of. Makinde isn't writing about dreaming as escapism. He's writing about it as something closer to identity, the idea that what you can picture for yourself says something real about who you are and who you're still becoming. That's a big idea wrapped in belly flops off Niagara Falls and lion sharks, which is exactly the right way to sneak it in.

His rhyme has real bounce to it without feeling forced or sing-songy in that grating way some children's verse can. The images he builds, skipping across oceans, tracking Big Foot, backpacking through Jamaica, are specific enough to spark genuine pictures in a child's mind rather than generic swirls of color. Specificity in children's writing is rarer than it should be, and Makinde clearly understands its power.

This is a book worth reading more than once, and not just because the child will ask you to.

About The Author

Ebenezer O. Makinde

Ebenezer O. Makinde is the award-winning author of seven books, Reign of Freedom (2019), Light of Darkness (2021), Worth of Diamonds (2023), Hopeland (2023), Cassius King (2023), The Wonderful Attic of Dreams (2024) and the award-winning collection of poetry Rise: An Inspired Book of Dreams.