BIGGER

Kirk (Breakfast at the Liberty Diner, 1997, etc.) has an unusual spin on an evergreen picture-book theme: getting bigger. After starting out in his mother’s womb “so small that I was hardly even me,” a child recalls passing infancy and toddlerdom on the way to school age, and the point where “everywhere I looked I saw my world getting bigger . . . and I was big enough to hold it all.” Blue-eyed and apple-cheeked, the cheery narrator swells on each successive spread, making frequent eye contact with viewers without ignoring family or friends in the process. The frame and backgrounds grow too, beginning small and featureless, gradually expanding as the child’s body and consciousness expand, to include parents, toys, the dinner table, friends, neighbors, and at last, the wide world, symbolized by an array of clearly seen objects, from a prism to a totem pole. Sharp color boundaries and even lighting give Kirk’s rounded figures the look of polished wood carvings. A concise and ebullient reminder that physical size is not the only way children grow. (Picture book. 4-6)