Time to Fly

Capturing both the lyrical quality of Lyon's rhymed colloquy and a sense of how scary the wide world looks to the little bird, Coleman offers spare, delicately detailed views of an adult robin and her mottled offspring . . . A sensitive, loving variation on a perennial picture-book theme

"You've outgrown this woven home./ It's time to fly!" urges a mother bird, bright blue with an orange breast, who perches a few feet away from the tree where her last offspring stubbornly refuses to budge. The little bird, however, not a fan of change, insists that "Nest is best." Readers can sympathize, given the vast sky above and the vertiginous bird's eye view of the ground below. But persistence eventually pays off when the mother tempts the would-be fledgling with a snack, rewards its short round trip with a snuggle (shown in a sweet extreme close-up), and then delivers some hard truths: a flightless baby bird is a sitting duck for a hawk, shown circling in the background above. And so the bird steels itself, then takes off to join its siblings: "Hello wings!/ Hello air! / I'm on my way...// to everywhere!" A fresh breeze blows through this familiar story of nurture and independence, thanks to Lyon's (Trains Run!) emphatic metered verse, which offers structure to the avian ordeal, and Fizer Coleman's (Birds of a Feather) digital art, whose varied cinematic framing evokes layered textures of printmaking and watercolor. Ages 4-8. Author's agent: Brenda Bowen, Book Group. Illustrator's agent: Anne Moore Armstrong, Bright Agency. (July)

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