Sylvester's Letter

A nuanced celebration of the lasting joy that intergenerational friendship inspires.

Loss fuels a creative contemplation of love in this imaginative story of memoriam from the creators of Drawing on Walls. Young narrator Sylvester, portrayed with pale skin and dark hair, sits at a table, drawing means of sending the letter they've written to "G.G. (Greatest Grandma)." Cochran works in dynamic, pixelated art that pulses with color. In the child's drawings, skydivers will deliver the letter, after Sylvester "high-five them onto the plane." The skydivers, portrayed with varying skin tones, jump and make a human flower; the skydiver carrying the envelope lands on a train in a jungle. In reality, the child tucks the letter into a knapsack, cycles into the mountains, and launches it off a precipice in a toy plane whose arc mimics that of distant shooting stars. Now, pages toggle between sentences of the letter ("I miss you every day. I always think of you when Mom puts a pickle on my plate," Burgess writes) and images of the child's journey home, where a small but miraculous occurrence seems to signal a reply. Merging fantasy and reality, the creators pay tribute to the way Sylvester's love helps to process longing and sorrow. Ages 6-up. (Aug.)

Copyright 2023 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

★ How does one commune with the dearly departed? Although listeners won't know the nature of young Sylvester's grandmother's absence until they piece together context clues, this is the matter the child is working out... Poet Burgess and artist Cochran—the team that produced Drawing on Walls (2020)—expertly capture an imaginative child's perspective and logic with lovely, alliterative language and wordless spreads rendered in brilliant colors and markerlike scrawls. A marvelous double gatefold portrays the entire journey... A nuanced celebration of the lasting joy that intergenerational friendship inspires. —Kirkus, STARRED REVIEW

Writer Matthew Burgess and illustrator Josh Cochran use buoyant language and joyful colors to show a young boy's love for his dead grandmother and his determination to get a letter delivered to her. Any parent who has ever had a child rush up to explain the minutiae of, say, a newly built Lego spaceship will recognize the tremendous excitement, the wild imaginativeness, of the boy as he explains how he will dispatch his letter via a team of skydivers... and, and!—as two pages open out in a gatefold, the whole extravagant vision bursts into view. —Wall Street Journal

At the beginning of the book, Sylvester is writing a letter to the 'greatest Grandma'. His vivid and exuberant illustrations show what he would want to tell his special grandmother if he could... Gradually we begin to understand that Sylvester's grandmother is dead and that is the reason that he is having such difficulty getting his letter to her. The illustrations are reflective of Sylvester's imagination and fill the pages with color and swoopy exuberance... A big 'I Love You' covers part of the last page. The message got through. —Pam Watts, Head of Children's Services (Robbins Library, Arlington, MA), for Youth Services Book Review, STARRED REVIEW