We were thrilled to find a sophisticated review of Empty Fridge in the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s an extract …

It is not extreme weather but lack of food that presents the central problem in “Empty Fridge”… a picture book for younger children by French illustrator Gaetan Doremus. In the modern apartment building that M. Doremus depicts with delicate black lines and splashes of color, people have become so involved with their daily activities—chatting on the phone and “playing music non-stop”—that they have failed to provision for themselves. Come suppertime, Andrew has just three carrots, Nabil has two eggs and a bit of cheese, and Claire, on the third floor, has only some tomatoes.

As in the old folk tale “Stone Soup,” the solution lies in a kind of cheerful collectivism—voluntary, mind you—that brings neighbors together with their edible oddments to conjure a meal that will feed everyone. Given that the author-illustrator is a Frenchman, it is perhaps no surprise that the resulting fusion food is a colorful quiche. “Slices of quiche, slices of life,” we read, as the quiche fad spreads from the building across the whole city. “It’s such a pleasant and refreshing thing to do,” this sharing of food, that “people find themselves asking: ‘Why don’t we do this every day?’ “

– by Meghan Cox Gurdon. A version of this article appeared June 1, 2013, on page C6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Droughts And Squalls.