Wild Blue: Taming a Big-Kid Bike

A new tale with a classic feel that will buoy many young riders.

The acrylic-ink illustrations and sunset hues brilliantly enhance the Old West metaphor, as the landscape shifts incrementally from urban to rural. . . a great example of step-by-step learning.

Slater does an excellent job inhabiting that space between imagination and real life that allows two things to be true: Wild Blue can be simultaneously a horse and a bicycle. Hughes's soft acrylic-ink illustrations capture that space as well: we sometimes see Kayla in a cowboy hat in the company of a large horse, and at other times in a bicycle helmet with her bike. Readers will appreciate Kayla's commitment to her imaginative life, along with Slater's twist on the familiar learning-to-ride-a-bike story.

Through the extended metaphor of taming a wild stallion, an imaginative child describes learning to ride a new bike in this warmly encouraging story. When Daddy puts Kayla's little pink bike "out to pasture," the child, portrayed with tan skin and lasso in hand, is taken to "wrangle a new one from the herd" at the local bike shop, selecting a snazzy blue two-wheeler that's called Wild Blue. "This bike's not tame enough to ride!" declares Kayla after being "bucked" from the bicycle. Working with acrylic ink, Hughes leans into the book's premise, incorporating western references into what seem like otherwise metropolitan scenes: in one spread, a group of cyclists transforms into a pack of horseback-riding kids in western hats; in another, the bike's shadow is that of a horse. Time spent practicing at a park eventually yields results, and the oneness the child achieves with Wild Blue as they ride off into the sunset--"Her legs are my legs./ Her mane, my mane./ Her breath, my breath"--aptly captures the thrilling triumph of learning to ride. Ages 3-7. (Feb.)

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