HOW DO YOU DANCE?

A simple question—“How do you dance?”—meets resistance from one bespectacled youngster, who’s surrounded by a diverse, exuberant cast of characters displaying their signature moves in a range of settings and scenarios.

Heder perfectly captures the joy each figure finds in dance with muted watercolor-and-pencil illustrations against a white background. The serif typeface lends an authoritative air to the narrative voice’s descriptions of movement while playful hand-lettered text is sprinkled throughout to indicate characters’ responses to the “official” text. The typography also works with the book’s landscape format to emphasize the ways in which one might move—“FAST FAST FAST” in blurred italics and a drawn-out “sloooo o o o w w w w”—across a horizontal axis. The text’s organic, encouraging flow pauses at an official-looking chart that demonstrates such moves as “the swivel,” “the toodle,” and “the scoot” before taking an unexpected and delightful pirouette into the surreal: A full-bleed spread shows humans, including a dancer in a wheelchair, sharing a dimly lit dance floor (complete with disco ball) with dinosaurs, a robot, and horses. The reluctant dancer, who is not named or gendered by the text, has short dark brown hair and peachy tan skin and wears a green pullover with purple shorts and sneakers.

A gleeful, tender celebration of self-expression through movement, destined to become a favorite read-aloud.