SOMEDAY, MAYBE

Dream on, young inventors! There’s lots of work in your future.

Upbeat, rhyming verse helps readers explore the imaginations and dreams of several young inventors as they create plans for flying cars, self-cleaning houses, and alternate food sources (for instance, earthworms). Perhaps they will sing with a robotic backup band that they’ve built and programmed, use “X-ray specs / to scan for broken bones,” or deliver packages with hypersonic drones. Maybe space will call and they will work in the first town on the moon, study lunar mold in a lab and find the cure for the common cold, or send rovers to Mars and beyond. Someday, they might create a holographic crew to explore the “volcanoes of / a strange, uncharted land.” But inventing and exploring can leave young dreamers a bit homesick, and that’s how families can help—with tight hugs and praise that encourage more dreaming of what might be. Detailed illustrations, often in rich jewel tones, show diverse young inventors. A tan-skinned child uses a wheelchair. The children’s families are diverse as well, with a one-parent family and what appears to be a same-sex family represented. Backmatter explains that many of the inventions mentioned already exist, though some aren’t quite ready to be used by the public. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Will spur children to “keep on dreaming… / of what, someday, may be.”