PICTURE THE SKY

Adults and children alike perform their daily activities under vast and varied skies.

Why is the sky blue? This perennial question often asked by young children may be resolved (or at least dodged) as children learn that the sky is not always blue. It is “an ever-changing, always open, everyone welcome art gallery.” Alongside the tantalizing Plasticine art that Reid is known for, she asks, “How do you picture the sky?” And in a series of short sentences, she invites readers on a tour of the sky in all its iterations: at sunrise, when “It can be…the curtain rising on your day”; at sunset; on a sunny, cloudless day; peeking out between trees or the tall buildings of a cityscape where “it can slip into the background.” And on days of low-lying fog it “can play hide-and-seek.” Some see castles in the clouds, polar bears in the constellations, or figures dancing in the northern lights. “You may find a story in the sky.” Although the art is not as joyously unbridled as in her companion book on trees (Picture a Tree, 2013), colorful, multidimensional images depict diverse children (about half present white and half as children of color) as they take pleasure in the sky and realize that “there is more than one way to picture the sky.”

In this aesthetically pleasing homage, Reid obliges young readers to contemplate the sky in all its not-always-blue expansive magnificence.