What if one day... / Bruce Handy ; Ashleigh Corrin.

Title :

What if one day...

Author:

Format:

Books

Summary:

Considers how our world would change and how we would feel if it lacked birds, water, plants, bugs or people--and wonders what makes our world what it is and if all we need is already here in front of us.

Language:

English

Audience:

Ages 4-12 Enchanted Lion Books.

ISBN - ISSN:

9781592703838

1592703836

Physical Description:

1 volume (unpaged) : color illustrations ; 27 x 28 cm

Subject:

Mindfulness (Psychology) -- Juvenile fiction.

Children's questions and answers -- Juvenile fiction.

Picture books for children.

Mindfulness -- Fiction.

Questions and answers -- Fiction.

Picture books.

First Title value, for Searching:

What if one day... / Bruce Handy ; Ashleigh Corrin.

Holds: Copies:

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Library	Audience	Home Location	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Central	Kid/Juvenile	Picture books	New juvenile books	E HANDY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Johnson	Kid/Juvenile	Picture books	New juvenile books	E HANDY	Searching... Unknown
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Searching... Ring	Kid/Juvenile	Picture books	New juvenile books	E HANDY	Searching... Unknown
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Searching... Shepard-Acres Homes	Kid/Juvenile	Picture books	New juvenile books	E HANDY	Searching... Unknown
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Summary

A New York Times Best Children's Book of 2023! An Academy of American Poets' Featured Fall Book for Young Readers! A Bookstagang Best of 2023 Winner: Best Illustration! This thought-provoking, playful picture book from NYT Best Children's Book author Bruce Handy and Ezra Jack Keats Award winning illustrator Ashleigh Corrin plays with the idea of how life would be if certain of the things we love most were no longer here.

What if one day, all the birds flew away? Mornings would be quieter. Skies would be plainer. Worms could relax. What if there were no more bugs? What if there ceased to be day and night? By asking how our world would change if it lacked birds, water, or people, and how we would feel about that, this playful text from Bruce Handy ( The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in Its Mouth ), accompanied by joyful art from Ashleigh Corrin ( Layla's Happiness ), invites readers to celebrate the beauty and wonder of existence, and all that makes our world what it is. So often, our gaze is on the future, on that better world to come, but what if the world as it is--with light and water, salt, earth, and animals, plants and insects, air and stars and French fries--is sufficient, and it is only us who have not known how to cherish it, or to love it all well enough? This book reminds us that all we need is here, if only we attend!

Author Notes

Bruce Handy is an author, journalist, essayist, critic, humorist, and editor. His first book for young readers, The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in Its Mouth , was named a Best Children's Book of 2021 by the New York Times . Handy is also the author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult (Simon & Schuster). He has also worked as a writer-editor at Vanity Fair, Time, Esquire, and Spy and has contributed to the New York Times Magazine , the New York Times Book Review, New York , and the New Yorker , as well as other publications that don't have New York in their titles, including The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal . He currently lives in New York with his wife, the novelist Helen Schulman.

Ashleigh Corrin is a graphic designer by day, illustrator by night, residing in Northern VA with her husband. Her picture book debut, Layla's Happiness, won the 2020 Ezra Jack Keats Award for illustration. Her talent comes from her late grandmother who has inspired Ashleigh to serve people's unique stories with creativity. With her illustrations, Ashleigh hopes to contribute to good laughs, nostalgia, vulnerability, transparency, and seeing the light in ourselves and others.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

This joyful prose poem by Handy (The Book from Far Away), illustrated with playful, hand-lettered spreads by Corrin (Mary Can!), approaches gratitude in an unexpected way: by considering the space that beloved entities might leave behind. "What if one day.../ all the birds flew away?" wonders a child portrayed with brown skin. "Skies would be plainer" (a lone hand and baseball are seen in the sky); "worms could relax" (a worm lounges in a lawn chair wearing sunglasses). A page turn later, a spread bursts with wings and avian beings in flight: "But there are BIRDS!" More sequences propose and provoke, inquiring about a world absent of a given thing--water, plants, nighttime, insects--and then affirming that thing's empirical existence. Following "What if one day...// all the colors faded away?" the revelation of a rich reality bursts forth in rainbow shades: "But there are COLORS!" Final pages ask whether there's something missing from the world that hasn't yet been thought up, prompting, "What would you dream of?" Upbeat, sunny, and philosophically creative, these lines leave behind a sense of startled freshness that mimics the relief of having a bad dream, and waking up from it. Ages 5--8. (Sept.)

Horn Book Review

This playful and introspective book asks readers to ponder what the world would be like if things taken for granted disappeared. What if "all the birds flew away"? What if "all the water disappeared"? What if "the sun never set"? Handy presents eight of these scenarios, each one imaginatively exploring what might happen in Corrin's energetic, full-bleed illustrations dominated by vivid ambers. If the birds flew away, for instance, skies would be "plainer." There's much humor here too. If the birds did indeed fly away, worms could take it easy -- Corrin's illustration depicts worms lounging on beach chairs and reading books -- and if all the water disappeared, soap would fail to work. (The absence of color results in some humorous crayon names: "Dirty Snow" and "Deepening Gloom.") The text succeeds on many levels; children are subtly prompted to consider the effects of climate change (if there were no more people, nature "could relax") yet to also ponder our creative contributions ("there would be no more music or art or stories or dancing"). Each scenario concludes with an exuberant statement in the affirmative to enthusiastically remind readers of the delights of their planet: "But there is WATER!" and "But there are COLORS!" The pitch-perfect ending invites discovery, asking us to contemplate the "something" missing "because it hadn't been dreamt of yet." Julie DanielsonNovember/December 2023 p.59 (c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Review

Handy's latest picture book explores what might happen should different parts of our world suddenly be erased. "What if one day…all the birds flew away?" Or if "all the water disappeared?" How about if there were no plants or colors or people? This text gets readers thinking about aspects of our world that can easily be taken for granted. It offers some gentle consequences, like worms relaxing in birds' absence, before pivoting to ask readers to imagine what might be missing one day "because it hadn't been dreamt of yet." The well-intended attempt at encouraging readers' thoughtfulness is undermined by some oversights. Namely, for many readers, such as those who live in areas threatened by climate change and deforestation or without access to clean water, these are not what-if scenarios; they are current or looming realities that are dismissed each time Handy insists "but there is water" or "but there are birds." The book's conceit--calling upon children to use their imaginations to envision how the world might look--is promising, but instead of empowering readers to create meaning for themselves, the text gets more muddled the closer they look. Depicting racially diverse characters, Corrin's full, vibrant spreads convey movement and stillness, humor and pensiveness, hitting just the right visual tones, but the writing doesn't quite manage to live up to the artwork. Readers will need to mind the gap between this book's premise and what it actually delivers. (Picture book. 3-7) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.