Once, a Bird

PreS-Gr 3--The shadows are long on the snow, and the ice is going out of the lakes and rivers. Winter is giving up, and there are small green buds starting to unfurl on skinny, thawing branches where a small robin lands, just outside an apartment building. In this wordless book, there are already metaphors upon metaphors, for the world is not only leaving winter behind, but also a pandemic, and the people behind the apartment building's windows are looking out at the bird, and then, surprising themselves, at one another. Dion boldly moves back and forth between the perspective of the red-breasted robin, taking in dried yellow grass for nesting, and the perspective of children leaning out the windows, one white, one Black, gossiping excitedly. A dog gets walked. Old people hold hands. Three new birds are born and must be fed; they will need their strength to fly off to build their own nests. Hope builds, page by page, and all because the robin landed just then, on that branch. This is a very wise book, speaking volumes in Singh's stage directions and Dion's springtime colors. VERDICT Share this at story hours, or hand it to the child struggling to read; this communicates essential truths without use a word. Marvelous.--Kimberly Olson Fakih

In the opening sequence of this eerie wordless picture book, a bird resembling a robin alights on snowy branches, then flies over cloverleaf highways and sectional croplands without encountering a single person. In lichen-green and pale blue watercolor and gouache panels, Dion shows the bird perched solo at an empty playground and bathing in a fountain, and what initially seems peaceful begins to feel troubling. As buds arrive on trees, the bird descends through chalky clouds to a branch near an apartment building, where its song inspires astonished humans, portrayed with various skin tones, to look, leading to moments of connection. Even after the bird raises three young--drawing people to their windows and even out of doors--the title's unsettling opening lingers, seeming to offer a subtext-heavy ecological warning that lands without much explanation. Ages 3-5. (Sept.)