WHAT COULD IT BE?

A big blue box is waiting for Sameer when he returns home from school, and he tries to guess what’s inside.

In Sameer’s second outing (What Will I Be?, 2014), the boy and his mother, dressed in a blue shalwar kameez (tunic and pants worn in South Asia), play a guessing game in patterned sentences. The highlighted words appear in the text as in the first work but only in Sameer’s sentences. As the boy uses his senses and wits to figure out the contents of the package, his mother assures him that he can do everything that he wants to do with the objects in the box. She keeps telling him that he hasn’t guessed yet, but occasionally she does give him a clue. When he queries: “Could it be a puzzle?…Is it something I can piece together and form a picture?” Amma responds: “You’ll form pictures, but it isn’t a puzzle.” Other guesses include a book that will let him “enter a whole new world,” a magic set that will help him “make things appear and disappear” and blocks you can use to “make tall buildings and bridges.” When the gift is finally revealed, children will understand Amma’s cryptic answers. The wonderful relationship between mother and son is visualized in intense colors, striking perspectives and imagery straight out of children’s creative moments. A guessing game that spurs imagination. (Picture book. 3-6)