["The Boston Book"] is a rarely delightful picture book. Here is the Boston Bostonians dream they live in, the Hurleyless, Curleyless, Tobinless Boston, where the Common is not littered with last night's newspapers, where the street cleaners do not wait for spring rains and the native Yankee has not fled to the suburbs. It is the Boston of hills and crooked streets, of Peter Faneuil and the Adamses. Boston down to Dr. Holmes, with only touches on the age of Koussevitzky, baseball and the atom….

For a picture book Esther Forbes' text is informing and adequate, but stirs few recollections of the excellence of her "Paul Revere." With all her talent, she is—unfortunately—a peripheral Bostonian. But her outsider's feeling for us is sympathetic and friendly.