EMILE AND THE FIELD
Written by Kevin Young
Illustrated by Chioma Ebinama
This debut picture book by Young (the poetry editor of The New Yorker and director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) and Ebinama (a Nigerian-American visual artist who as a child never saw characters resembling her in the great outdoors”) is something beautiful. From its beautiful bracts, awash with wildflowers, and its sublime first words reminiscent of hanging in tall blue grasses, it captivates. Named after Young’s great-grandfather and inspired by his own son, Emile is a boy who “falls in love became” on a field, and the field (to feel cared for) loved him.
40 pp. Make me a world. $17.99. (Age 4 to 8)
JUST TO SEE
Written by Morgane de Cadier
Illustrated by Florian Pigé
Translated by Johanna McCalmont
Sometimes looking too intently at one thing means missing out on bigger, more casual pleasures. At the beginning of this whimsical crayon dream, a girl says she knows the forest she studies every day with binoculars from her tree house “inside and out”. Then suddenly she sees a tree that wasn’t there before, growing high above the rest and jumping into the forest, ‘just to see’. When she finds a deer among his “branches,” she asks why he allowed his antlers to grow so high. “No reason, just to see…,” he says, giving her free rein to climb onto it. By the time we reach the two wordless spreads towards the end, where readers can let their imaginations run wild, she’s exploring a whole new universe, from the outside in.
40 pages. Blue Dot Kids. $18.95. (Age 3 to 7)
LIZZY AND THE CLOUD
Written and illustrated by Terry Fan and Eric Fan
While most of the kids in the park run to the new merry-go-round, Lizzy goes in search of the “cloud salesman.” Instead of choosing a fluffy marshmallow cloud molded into an animal, she chooses an amorphous everyday one. The Brilliant Fan Brothers show us the miraculous in the ordinary, but unlike the colorful marble in “It Fell From the Sky,” the wonder of this book is in the meh-est of the meh, in your glorious mean” cloudy” day.
56 pp. Simon & Schuster. $18.99. (Age 4 to 8)
STOP THE CLOCK!
Written by Pippa Goodhart
Illustrated by Maria Christania
When a rushed classroom teacher (sketched in charcoal) tells a boy (shown in color) that he has no time to finish his photo of what he saw on his school dashboard, the boy collapses: “Stop the clock! Everyone, except the boy, freezes. Now they are in color and he is a shadow. After a “big, slow breath,” he adds his little sister to the painting. “Why is she crying?” he thinks and runs out to retrace his steps. He notices that the sky is more than ‘just clear blue’. There are “gray and white and … birds in it.” And he also notices what made his sister blue.
32 pp. Little Owl. $16.99. (Age 4 to 7)
TISHA AND THE BLOSSOMS
Written by Wendy Meddour
Illustrated by Daniel Egnéus
Tisha catches a blossom in her backyard, listens to the sounds on the way to the bus stop, reads a book about space, counts a ladybug’s spots when her mother, bus driver, teacher and friend say one by one: “Hurry up! .” By the time school is out, she’s crying, so she asks her mom to slow down. They take a walk along the beach, sit on a park bench, enjoy a picnic with her father and yes, they catch blossoms as they fall. Egnéus also collaborated with Meddour, using similar mixed media (colored pencils, watercolor, acrylic, pencil, ink, cut-out collage), on the acclaimed “Lubna and Pebble”, about a child refugee.
32 pp. Candlewick. $17.99. (Age 2 to 5)
THE DEPTH OF THE LAKE AND THE HEIGHT OF THE SKY
Written and illustrated by Kim Jihyun
Created to share the serenity South Korean Kim experienced outside of Seoul in “a lakeside town in another country, surrounded by a dense forest of trees,” this wordless debut follows a city boy and his dog during their first immersive encounter. with nature. Drawn and painted with writing ink, to show different light qualities, it is amazing to see.
48 pp. Floris. $17.95. (Age 4 to 7)
Jennifer Krauss is the children’s book editor of the Book Review.
