WOULD YOU COME TOO?

An imaginative, poetic picture book invites kids into the natural world.

The story follows three children—one brown-skinned, one Asian-presenting, and one White—as they envision themselves as elements in nature. Readers will feel compelled to imagine what it would be like to be a creek or a nest, a spring or a seed. Using many attributive adjectives and verbs of motion, each of the text’s rhyming quatrains starts with the refrain “if we were”: “If we were rivers, we’d run, boundless and wild and free”; “if we were rocks, we’d sit still,” and so on. Energetic watercolor gouache illustrations show the children moving through a forest, stopping by a pond, and running alongside a river as they head to the sea before darkness falls, prompting them to return home. There is the questionable use of a wigwamlike structure to represent a bird’s nest that the children sit inside, but most of the imagery is rooted in the flora and fauna of a woodland area. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A lyrical meditation on the magic of outdoor play that’s creditable for its back-to-nature message.