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VANILLA ICE CREAM by Bob Graham Kirkus Star

VANILLA ICE CREAM

by Bob Graham ; illustrated by Bob Graham

Pub Date: Aug. 1st, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7636-7377-2
Publisher: Candlewick

Everyday life conspires to change the world. Want to try an ice cream cone?

For Graham, great events can have the most quotidian beginnings. To start: The weather is hot, and the ground is dusty—this is India in the summer. There is an open-air, roadside eatery—samosas, lassi, puri and muri—and a table with chairs under a few palms. A trucker stops his rig, filled with sacks of rice. Truck-stop sparrows are a bold breed, and one notices that one of the rice sacks is spilling its precious cargo. Time to feast, even as the truck pulls away: “Like all wild birds, he follows the food.” The text is minimal, as compressed as a prose poem, letting Graham’s spacious, impeccably placed and paced watercolors tell the tale. The truck drives to a port; the sacks are loaded on a freighter, which sails to a new city. Another day dawns. The sparrow finds another eatery in a city park. The weather is hot. A grandma and granddad are having ice cream cones. The sparrow drops onto the table to investigate, which agitates the dog, which bumps granddad’s arm, which dumps the cone in the baby’s lap: A new world is born.

Heed Graham: Get up, get out of bed (drag a comb across your head, if you must), and go forth

.(Picture book. 4-8)