In a land of children known for their feats of fun, the tree house Treeheart is besieged by the middle-aged Mr. Grindle, whose touch can bring a fate worse than death: adolescence and adulthood.
[2] The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books praised it as "magnificent" and "a wild embrace of absurdity and wit with exaggerated language used for maximum impact", whose "illustrations are no less epic than the story" and "invite careful examination".
[3] Kirkus Reviews considered that, despite its "slapdash magical realism," the book is "an unabashedly joyful ode to the freedom of the child's mind" and "wonderfully weird".
[4] Publishers Weekly commended it as "lovingly crafted", "truly fresh [and] inventive", and "a joyously lyric, rapid-fire epic that honors the original's intricate linguistic constructions," noting its "racially diverse cast of fierce, distinctively rendered children.
"[5] In The New York Times, Sarah Boxer was more critical, assessing the characters as having goals that "are tediously uniform: sweets, toys and staying up late," the plot as "long (and) confusing", and the art as "sometimes funny (but) mostly chaotic."