SPACE TRAVELLERS

A gifted Australian writer (The Very Best of Friends, 1990) takes a deceptively simple look at a mother and son living in a ``rocket'' (an airy metal construction) in a city park. They aren't comfortable—the quarters are cramped and drafty, and the food they share with the other homeless is no feast, though they think of it as one—but Mandy and Zac keep their spirits up by imagining where the rocket could take them. In the end, Mandy finds a room with friends, with hopes of a job for her and school for Zac; their dazed friend Dorothy happily moves into the rocket, though winter is coming on. Wild tells her story expertly, while Rogers's soft color-pencil art, muted with shadows, shows these people as vibrantly interrelated and dimensional—unlike the homeless in Bunting's Fly Away Home (1991). The social-issue subtext here is subtly hidden in the details; the focus is on the humanity of Zac and his mother. Unrealistically upbeat, perhaps, but a good departure point for discussion. (Picture book. 5-9)