This book is a marvel. I bought it at Changing Hands in Tempe week ago for my 3.5 year-old daughter, based mostly on a quick flip through the books to check out the illustrations. The pictures are atmospheric, moody, and remarkable, so I nabbed it.It was a major hit. The story of the brother and sister from a self-sufficient family in a timeless "back of beyond" location on the Irish coast is clever, exciting, and spooky without being scary. My daughter absolutely adores it and has been constantly acting out key scenes from it. She loves the mysterious "Fog Man" and the strange animal companions he hangs out with.The plot is essentially as follows ***SPOILER ALERT YO***: - Brother and sister are presented by their dad with a boat he's made, and somberly instructed to stay close to the coast and, in any event, avoid Fog Island, which looms in the distance like a "jagged black tooth." - Bro and sis are out on the boat and encounter heavy fog. The currents whisk them far away from shore. - They land on a rocky island. It is spooky and they realize that it must be Fog Island. - Scaling a set of treacherous steps to the castle at the top of the crag, they meet the Fog Man, who lives there alone with his many weird animal companions and regulates the supply of fog to the coast. He is surprisingly innocuous and welcoming, providing bro and sis generous hospitality. - The kids wake up the next day amongst ruins, but still covered with the blanket that the Fog Man gave them, and with two hot bowls of the Fog Man's idiosyncratic stew beside them. The true nature of the Fog Man is left ambiguous. - Bro and sis return homeward and are rescued from a storm by their dad and his fishing pals. The village celebrates, but none believe their story of the Fog Man, and none dare venture to the island to check for the evidence that bro and sis say remains there.This book's also got some cool regional vocabulary words, such as "curragh" (the type of boat the siblings are in when they're pulled out to Fog Island on the tide).This is probably the best book I've bought for the kid that isn't by either Dr Seuss or Richard Scarry. A must-have, and one that I expect will entertain and inspire kids in a very wide age range.Parents note : Ungerer uses the word "hell" once to describe the appearance of a magma-filled well (by the flooding of which the Fog Man creates the fog of the coast), and I have been replacing that with an alternative word during readings so to avoid a theological discussion of eternal torment (in more ways than one) with a three-year-old, but apart from that and what the MPAA might call "mild peril," there's nothing worrisome or objectionable in the book. [though vegans may object to an image of the brother holding what appears to be a dead rabbit in one panel whose main focus is the shepherding activities of the siblings]the bottom line : GET THIS BOOK