"Chee-Lin: A Giraffe's Journey" by James Rumford; Houghton Mifflin, ages 8 and up

Manoa author/artist James Rumford's new book is a marvel from start to finish, with exquisite paintings, Caldecott-level attention to design, and an unforgettable tale. As in earlier works, Rumford's story takes us through history and around the world. Inspired by a painting of a giraffe by Shen Du in 1414, the book begins:

"Eighty years before Columbus set sail in 1492, China sent a fleet of ships to explore the world. The Chinese discovered many marvelous things, but of these discoveries, one stands out as the most marvelous of all: the chee-lin."

"In Chinese mythology, the chee-lin was a horned beast with the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and the hooves of a horse. Whenever the emperor was good and wise and the people content, there appeared a chee-lin. Only once in China's long history had a chee-lin appeared. That was at the birth of their wise man, Confucius.

"But two thousand years later, in our fifteenth century, another chee-lin appeared ... this time out of Africa. This chee-lin was just a giraffe, but to the Chinese, it was an omen of good fortune."

Not long after Tweega, the giraffe, is born in East Africa, he is captured and sent, as a gift, from the sultan of Malindi to the sultan on Bengal. This is the start of the journey that will ultimately find Tweega in China. Along the way, Tweega endures harsh conditions, and he finds kindness, but beneath the surface there is always a longing, which Rumford magically captures in his paintings of the animal.

"When I was writing it, I was thinking about the people that were taken out of Africa," Rumford said. "I was thinking about how they were taken out and put on display. They were exploited. Maybe that's part of the melancholy of it."

In researching the story, Rumford read the two surviving books written by men who traveled on the Chinese voyages in the early 1400s. Within the pages and on the back cover of "Chee-Lin," Rumford illustrates in his own magnificent calligraphy, a poem about the chee-lin. The poem, which Rumford also translates into English, is by the same calligrapher from the imperial court who created that painting which inspired this book, Shen Du.

It is difficult to classify "Chee-Lin" as a picture book or a chapter book.

Like Rumford's book "Traveling Man: The Journey of Ibn Battuta 1325-1354," each chapter here has a heading, and as the story progresses, each chapter grows longer.

"I really wanted this to be a transition from a picture book and a chapter book. I almost wanted to create a new kind of genre," Rumford said.

Rumford realizes his concept goes against a trend that is heading in the other direction. Chapter books are moving toward more pictures, manga-style, with the story told mostly through dialogue. "I want to go the other way, and bring out the words." Rumford says. "It's an interesting experiment."

A month into the release of "Chee-Lin," all signs point to success. Kirkus Reviews praised, "... characteristically lovely design ... evokes a flavor of the cultures and the time." And the American Library Association's Booklist gave the work a coveted starred review, calling it, "A rare work, richly imagined and caringly executed."