DELIVERY

Accompanied by illustrations fittingly charged with movement, minimal couplets tell the story of how a day’s-worth of goods are conveyed to their various destinations. After the stacking of newspapers, the news vans push off into the pre-dawn, while Suen (Baby Born, 1998, etc.) works other deliveries into the picture as the day progresses: canned goods, boxes, flowers. The text never exceeds 10 words per page, and is gauged to the youngest listener: “On its way,/a new day,” and “Wheels and wings/carry many things.” Larger distribution networks are developed—highway arteries, flyways, rail lines, and shipping lanes—until Suen closes the circle with the piping of oil into the city. Zahares elegantly links every pastel-rich illustration to the next, back and forth through space and time and perspectives, until readers are once again at the morning gas pump—the end of the line for the city’s petroleum web—with the newspaper delivery man and the sun just cracking the horizon. Both text and art have a pleasing circularity that corrals the rhythms of the day so that they can be appreciated anew. (Picture book. 3-8)