On the website of Toronto artist and author Cybèle Young, there are images of dozens of tiny sculptures she has made with Japanese paper and various materials. Each of the creations is delicate and dynamic: a miniature shopping cart held aloft by a silken parachute, a woman’s boot zipped open like a blossoming flower, a forlorn desk lamp staring down at its lost bulb. For artwork that could be destroyed by a heavy breeze, it packs a lot of whimsical punch.

Young’s books for children offer a similar mix of delicate craftsmanship and whimsy. Her first, Ten Birds, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for illustration in 2011. She has published several more since then, including her latest, The Queen’s Shadow. Though they vary wildly in terms of colour, tone, and theme (looking at select pages from her oeuvre, it would be difficult to guess they were created by the same artist), each is a visual delight.

For The Queen’s Shadow, Young drew the images in pen and ink, then digitally added bright patches of colour. This gives the illustrations the slightly unsettling look of archival prints that have been cut out and manipulated, then scattered over the page. It’s a perfect visual match for the story, which mashes together genres and tropes in a way that is absorbing and highly original, if not always successful.

As the subtitle suggests, the book is, in part, a science lesson about the ways different animals (including humans) perceive the world. On the surface, however, it is a slightly surreal tale of a royal party that goes awry. The Queen is hosting a ball for a group of esteemed noble-folk, who happen to be creatures of the land and sea. There’s a giant squid, a chameleon, a shark, a goat, and more. After a massive lightning flash shocks the guests and brings the party to a halt, the Queen discovers she has lost her shadow. Immediately, the Royal Detective (a brightly coloured mantis shrimp with almost impossibly good vision) sets out to solve the crime. One by one, he accuses each attendee. One by one, each is then exonerated by means of a short lesson on how it sees. Sir Chameleon is innocent, for example, because his eyes were moving independently of one another at the time, and could not have focused on a single target. Goat, meanwhile, could not have taken the shadow because the Queen was standing in the blind spot directly in front of his snout. So it goes, until finally it is revealed that her royal highness forgot her shadow in the bathroom. The book concludes with appendixes that explain the science of visual perception and provide facts about the animals in the story, plus a glossary of some of the trickier terms.

The book is somewhat clunky in its execution. How do these different forms of visual perception exonerate the creatures, exactly? And why does the solution to the mystery have nothing to do visual perception at all? Each layer of the narrative – royal ball, mystery, noble creatures – obscures the book’s underlying scientific lesson. The text doesn’t help: like some of Young’s previous books, the art outshines the prose. Beyond the mild mismatch between the relative sophistication of the scientific sidebars and the silliness of the main storyline, the text suffers from verbal bloat (“The Queen turned pink, then crimson, and then finally a hue perceptible only by those creatures able to see a wider spectrum of color than humans”).

Young is one of the country’s most talented and original illustrators – even readers who don’t grasp the science will enjoy the imagery of The Queen’s Shadow. While she may not have quite mastered the art of storytelling yet, there is no denying that Young continues to create books that are feasts for the eyes.