Text: 3 stars 
 Art: 5 stars 
 Hard to know what is real and what is fantasy or a dream; the text fuses these together, leaving me confused. Also, the story arc feels incomplete. They reach the Dalai Lama, but what happens when they tell him about the encroaching road? Do they ever reconnect with the road crew? Did the road crew even survive the crumbling mountain? How does the author's father get home to Prague? I'm still not clear why the author's father was away so long, or even how long he was away; there is a mention of 14 months at the end of the book, but the beginning of the story says that many Christmases had passed without him. Why did the author's father decide to give him the red box now? 
 The illustrations are superb. I'm not surprised this won a Caldecott Honor.