A child's imagination can make almost any ordinary thing magic. Here author Kate Hoefler and illustrator Dena Seiferling reach back into that childhood realm and bring magic to a car and a couch.
This lyrical book for readers ages four to eight starts simply: "This is a house." Then it takes wing:
"This is a house in the hills up high,
with a rusted old car in the sweet joe-pye ..."
The family living in the house — "the folks with tools and a heart" — fix up that old car just enough each day to allow them to drive it a short spell without it falling apart too much more. Then they tie their couch on top and go for a nighttime drive which becomes a flight of imagination all the way to the moon:
"a moon that is wondrous,
that never will break:
This is the shine
that nothing can take."
When the author was raising her children in Ohio's Appalachia, she would take them for long, soothing drives, on which they made up a game called "Peaceful World" — words they would call out whenever they saw anything they considered beautiful. She was often surprised by their choices, which included yard cars and abandoned school buses, things many people would call "junk". She shares this exquisite story in the hope that "other folks can be struck by what struck me on those drives (and still does now) — that there is beauty, magic, and meaning around us all, and a more tender way of seeing — a way that can perhaps serve as a reminder that all of us have people and 'junk' we can literally love to the moon and back."
Dena Seiferling's Note from the Illustrator is similarly moving. Among her gems is this observation about the moon: "... it is more than just an orbiting satellite. It is full of cracks, with a spectrum that exists within light itself, made of many colors, like a rainbow. Just like us."
This is a book full of heart, not to be missed.
