TREVOR

A lonely canary takes a chance on friendship and the payoff is immeasurable.

Bright yellow Trevor knows how to leave his cage (“a tiny peck and the door would pop open”), but he stays for the seeds, especially his favorite stripy ones, which he saves “for the loneliest days.” But then a potential companion arrives outside his window. Averbeck’s gentle fable describes a small bird who’s both too unworldly to recognize that his bright yellow friend is a lemon and too sweet to interpret the lemon’s silence as anything other than friendship. Trevor flies out of his cage to meet the lemon, bringing along his hidden stripy seed to share. Though the seed falls to the ground, Trevor builds a nest, sharing the summer days with his quiet friend, performing duets in which “the lemon sang the silences.” Hevron’s depiction of Trevor’s earnest embrace of this friendship and his small world of cage, window, brown tree, pale blue sky, and yellow lemon is filled with sweetness and simplicity of line and color. A storm knocks the lemon from the tree, but Trevor realizes that his friend has left a gift: The lemon’s tumble shakes the grown sunflower below, and brightly colored birds—new friends—soon come by to ask if they might share the stripy seeds with Trevor, and something big and lovely comes to Trevor as a result of his odd but memorable friendship.

Both poignant and triumphant at once.