The best part of a box is not always what's inside. As Jane Yolen and Chris Sheban highlight, the best part, for a child, is often times the box itself. Hiding inside of it, making it into a book nook, a car, a boat, an airplane, or as one of the pages illustrates, a peaceful resting spot, are just a few of the ways children could use a box.
Unlike your every day board book, What To Do With A Box gradually unfolds, page by page, until the reader can take all of those unfolded pages and piece them back together to make what I've been calling a book box. (Maybe Jane Yolen's next book should be What To Do With A Book!)
What I like most about the book is not only the fact that it's written by Jane Yolen, and that the illustrations depict how engrossed a child can become in the endless possibilities of the imagination, but also how the book encourages imaginative play and creativity -- for the child as well as for parents. I would even say that by encouraging creativity through What To Do With A Box, Yolen and Sheban are, perhaps inadvertently, encouraging children to always look for ways to gain ideas and creativity from good literature.
My only criticism (which has nothing to do with the story) is that while turning the book into an actual box it sometimes collapses. My son came up with an easy fix though. Tape!