Review by Booklist Review
A blue-eyed child, tan with flowing blond hair, escapes the dreary, black-and-gray city for a trip to the country, which bursts with blended layers of neon greens, pinks, yellows, and blues. As the child frolics in flower-laden fields, the reader is addressed with questions about their experience with nature, quickly turning abstract. "Have you ever seen a flower using nothing but your nose? . . . what do you see? Raindrops made of honey? The knees of bumblebees? A fancy lady?" The text takes readers on an imaginative journey inside flowers, activating all the senses and gradually thinning the distance between the human body and nature, until the two become one, prompting readers to imagine themselves as the flower, to feel themselves growing and stretching toward the sun. There's a deep intensity to all the proceedings, rooted in the astounding, dense colored-pencil illustrations and extending to the metaphoric text, which reaches for an odd sort of physical intimacy with the reader. Creative, dazzling, and fearless, Harris' authorial debut marks an auspicious new chapter to his picture-book career.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Leaving a huddle of pencil-gray skyscrapers in its wake, a car holding a city's single colorful denizen heads for wide-open country and into hills covered with wildflowers. A child with long, multihued hair, a white terrier at their heels, runs into a variegated meadow awash in hues. "Have you ever seen a flower?" a voice asks, then presses further: "I mean really...// seen a flower?" The child buries their face amid the field's blooms. "Have you ever seen a flower using nothing but your nose?" The persistent questioning is matched by the visual intensity of the spreads, colored-pencil drawings bursting with energy, angular shapes in rainbow hues that are bounded by crisp-edged negative space. Attention is paid first to the senses as ways of knowing nature deeply, and then to the idea of aliveness itself. "Life is inside you," the voice says. "Now sip a drip of water..." it instructs, "Feel it slip and trickle all the way down to your roots. Do you feel yourself growing?" With assurance and passion in his solo debut, Harris (A Polar Bear in the Snow) connects readers to the stirrings of life in all its forms. Ages 3--5. Agent: Steven Malk, Writers House. (May)
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Review by Horn Book Review
The child in Harris's pencil illustrations first appears as a bright patch of color within a grayscale cityscape and then emerges into a rainbow world of blooms. The pictures have a rich visual texture, vibrant color, and a naive style, which together imply a child as ostensible artist. This effect is well aligned with the playfully inquisitive text, with rhythm and repetition akin to books by Margaret Wise Brown and Ruth Krauss: "Have you ever seen a flower? I mean really...seen a flower? I mean way down in the clover with your face down in a flower?" The text's direct address invites viewers and readers not just to see a flower alongside the child but to engage in a multisensory experience of communing with nature. Have you ever seen a book quite like this? Not likely. Megan Dowd Lambert July/August 2021 p.82(c) Copyright 2021. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A young urbanite romps through floral fields and deep into a flower's anatomy, exploring humanity's connection to nature. A solo car travels away from the dense, gray cityscape. Mountains rise up, full of pattern and light, before revealing a fluorescent field of flowers. A child bursts from the car across the page, neon-rainbow hair streaming in the wind, as both child and place radiate joy and life. The brown-skinned, blue-eyed youngster breathes in the meadow and begins an adventure--part Jamberry, part "Thumbelina," and part existential journey as the child realizes the life force running through the veins of the flower is the same that runs through all of us, from the water that sustains to the sun that grows. Harris' colored-pencil illustrations are full of energy and spontaneity. His use of patterning and graphic symbology evoke Oaxacan design, yet the style is all his own. The text is equally enthusiastic: "Have you ever seen / a flower so deep / you had to shout / HELLO / and listen for an echo / just to know / how deep it goes?" The text shifts abruptly from metaphor to metaphor, in one spread the flower likened to a palace and a few pages later, to human anatomy. Nevertheless, like the protagonist and the natural environment, readers will feel themselves stretch and bloom. A visual feast teeming with life. (Picture book. 3-7) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
