FLOOR IT!

An infant’s crawl across the living room turns into a fantastical, perspective-shifting racing adventure.

A red-helmeted baby races across a living room that’s been recast as an epic racetrack, with furniture and other ordinary objects becoming forests, mountains, and waterways. Encouraged by an older sibling (“Baby, start your engine…crawl!”), the determined infant navigates obstacles, makes pit stops, and presses onward to the finish line. Tobin Fine’s racing terminology (straightaway, stalls) creates an effective sports-announcer rhythm that propels the narrative forward, while the consistent rhyming text keeps the momentum going throughout. Fabiani’s child-friendly mixed-media illustrations skillfully depict the dual perspective—both the actual living room and the way the baby sees it. The compositions play with scale, transforming a parquet floor and fluffy carpeting into vast terrains from Baby’s viewpoint. In one particularly effective spread, Fabiani frames Baby’s vision through a helmet-shaped portal with dashboardlike indicators below, cleverly simulating how the world might appear through a racer’s visor, reinforcing Baby’s imaginative point of view while maintaining the book’s racing theme. Worth noting is the text’s consistent use of they/them pronouns for the baby and nongendered descriptions of family members (“Parked right on their parent’s knee, / Baby’s where they’re meant to be”). Characters are pale-skinned.

Buckle up for this intrepid crawler’s quest—a rhyming ride with a racing twist.