SKY BLUE ACCIDENT/ACCIDENTE CELESTE

In Luján’s free verse poem, a boy on his way to school collides with the sky and breaks it. When he shows broken pieces to his teacher, she flies off into the now-white sky. The schoolchildren paint a new blue sky, finished off by the narrator’s final pieces of the original. The story is quite short, about 16 lines in the original Spanish, but evocative in its surrealistic dream world. Grobler’s illustrations flesh out and expand upon the text, creating both the cityscape through which the boy rides to school and an important character not mentioned in the text, a sort of totem-bird that seems to preside over the fantastic events, distracting the boy into his accident and accompanying the teacher on her flight. His style shares the deliberate naïveté of David Shannon and the retro simplicity of Maira Kalman and many French and Spanish artists. While not essential, this is a vibrantly presented and provocative exploration of the imagination. (Picture book. 4-8)