ME AND MY BIKE

On his Grandpa’s (possibly) magic teapot a lad makes two of his allotted three wishes: for a new bike—soon. Things don’t work out quite as expected, however; first his best friend buys the bike on which he’d set his heart, and then a shared joyride ends in a disastrous crash. After his mother tells him the chestnut about how she used to fret that she had no shoes until she met a man who had no legs, he reflects on how hard she works to support the family, finally settling for a new coat of paint on Grandpa’s old bike. Ander gives the tale a contemporary Chinese setting, dressing the skinny narrator in sneakers and baggy shorts, placing him in tidy but not-so-prosperous surroundings and tucking in non-English signs and sound effects for added flavor. Printed on textured paper, the bright, delicate illustrations begin and end on the endpapers; nonetheless, pasting down the flaps won’t hide anything significant in this thoughtful take on the universal theme of wanting one thing, but settling for something else. (Picture book. 6-8)