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  • What If One Day...

What If One Day...

Author
Illustrator
Ashleigh Corrin
Publication Date
September 26, 2023
Genre / Grade Band
Fiction /  K − 1st
Language
English
Format
Picture Book
What If One Day...

Description

New York Times Best Children’s Book of 2023! An Academy of American Poets' Featured Fall Book for Young Readers! A Bookstagang Best of 2023 Winner: Best Illustration! This thought-provoking,  playful picture book from NYT Best Children's Book author Bruce Handy and Ezra Jack Keats Award winning illustrator Ashleigh Corrin plays with the idea of how life would be if certain of the things we love most were no longer here.

What if one day, all the birds flew away? Mornings would be quieter. Skies would be plainer. Worms could relax. What if there were no more bugs? What if there ceased to be day and night? By asking how our world would change if it lacked birds, water, or people, and how we would feel about that, this playful text from Bruce Handy (The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in Its Mouth), accompanied by joyful art from Ashleigh Corrin (Layla's Happiness), invites readers to celebrate the beauty and wonder of existence, and all that makes our world what it is. So often, our gaze is on the future, on that better world to come, but what if the world as it is—with light and water, salt, earth, and animals, plants and insects, air and stars and French fries—is sufficient, and it is only us who have not known how to cherish it, or to love it all well enough? This book reminds us that all we need is here, if only we attend! 

Publication date
September 26, 2023
Genre
Fiction
ISBN-13
9781592703838
Publisher
Enchanted Lion Books
BISAC categories
JUV009000 - Juvenile Fiction | Concepts | General
JUV051000 - Juvenile Fiction | Imagination & Play
JUV002000 - Juvenile Fiction | Animals | General
JUV074000 - Juvenile Fiction | Diversity & Multicultural
Library of Congress categories
Picture books
Mindfulness (Psychology)
Mindfulness

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review

This joyful prose poem by Handy (The Book from Far Away), illustrated with playful, hand-lettered spreads by Corrin (Mary Can!), approaches gratitude in an unexpected way: by considering the space that beloved entities might leave behind. "What if one day.../ all the birds flew away?" wonders a child portrayed with brown skin. "Skies would be plainer" (a lone hand and baseball are seen in the sky); "worms could relax" (a worm lounges in a lawn chair wearing sunglasses). A page turn later, a spread bursts with wings and avian beings in flight: "But there are BIRDS!" More sequences propose and provoke, inquiring about a world absent of a given thing--water, plants, nighttime, insects--and then affirming that thing's empirical existence. Following "What if one day...// all the colors faded away?" the revelation of a rich reality bursts forth in rainbow shades: "But there are COLORS!" Final pages ask whether there's something missing from the world that hasn't yet been thought up, prompting, "What would you dream of?" Upbeat, sunny, and philosophically creative, these lines leave behind a sense of startled freshness that mimics the relief of having a bad dream, and waking up from it. Ages 5-8. (Sept.)

Copyright 2023 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.
Bruce Handy
Bruce Handy is an author, journalist, essayist, critic, humorist, and editor. His first book for young readers, The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in Its Mouth, was named a Best Children's Book of 2021 by the New York Times. Handy is also the author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult (Simon & Schuster). He has also worked as a writer-editor at Vanity Fair, Time, Esquire, and Spy and has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, New York, and the New Yorker, as well as other publications that don't have New York in their titles, including The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. He currently lives in New York with his wife, the novelist Helen Schulman.


Ashleigh Corrin is a graphic designer by day, illustrator by night, residing in Northern VA with her husband. Her picture book debut, Layla's Happiness, won the 2020 Ezra Jack Keats Award for illustration. Her talent comes from her late grandmother who has inspired Ashleigh to serve people's unique stories with creativity. With her illustrations, Ashleigh hopes to contribute to good laughs, nostalgia, vulnerability, transparency, and seeing the light in ourselves and others.

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