FOLLOW ME

This book starts with the cover, a picture of a small girl with a large braid getting onto a swing under a tree. On the endpapers, a swirl of greens and yellows are overlain with the vibrant line of petal, leaf and bud. “I wander through pink,” says the girl on the first page, swinging high over pale roses and other blooms against a pastel sky, “and get lost in blue,” she continues, swinging and smiling at the vast blue sky. She swings until, released in her imagination, she flies through the greenness of those endpapers and into a stand of trees, “Follow me, follow me / deep into brown, / into the bright white of yellow, / into orange / that slips into red, / all tumbled together.”  She is truly flying now, in an airy sea of leaves and birds, insects and seedpods. She returns to the swing, then to the ground to twirl and twirl into her own backyard. The beautiful etchings are rich in color and alive with vibrant line. All of what she sees—trees and sky, leaves and seeds, birds and flowers—are in her backyard, but she has transformed them with the power of her imagination as strongly as if she had sprinkled them with fairy dust. A glorious visual meditation on light, color and home for even the smallest child and artist. (Picture book. 4-9)