If You Look Up to the Sky

In a gentle story about family, memory, and interconnectedness, a narrator recalls the words spoken to her by her grandmother when she was a child, urging her to seek perspective and assurance by looking at the sky. Sikorskaia's luminous, milky paintings depict a brown-skinned child on a beach, watching an approaching storm and holding glowing, fireflylike constellations within her hands. She grows older and is seen sitting in a rowboat in a bay, pointing up at the shapes made by clouds: "If you look up to the sky and see big, billowing clouds, find as many shapes as you can. It's the universe's way of helping you create new dreams." She also gazes out over an expanse of rocky canyons set against "a sea of blue." Finally, the child is fully grown, with her own son; the two look up at the moon to see the kind face of her grandmother, watching over them from above: "Know that you will always find me in the brightness of the full moon." Writing with tenderness and warmth, Dalton emphasizes that that there is comfort to be found in both the memories of lost loved ones and in the great expanse of the universe. Ages 4-8. (BookLife)