SMILE

A smile spreads across a city.

On the book’s title page, a brown-skinned parent and child prepare to head out into the rain and start their day. Both wear sour expressions after trudging out—“late again”—to make their way to the subway. Once they’re seated, however, the young narrator encounters a pale-skinned child whose smile proves positively contagious despite the gloomy atmosphere that has pervaded previous pages. Soon, the parent is smiling, too. From this point on, Shleifer adds bursts of sunny yellow to express the warm feelings that smiles bring to the characters, brightening up the pages and shifting away from the rainy-day palette established earlier. (There’s a slightly retro feel to the style, evoking the work of Ezra Jack Keats or Bernard Waber.) After leaving the subway, the parent and child share smiles with others they meet on the street, among them a fruit vendor, a bicyclist, pedestrians, and a crossing guard. “A smile is for sharing,” says the child when approaching a school, leading up to an encounter with a pale-skinned youngster on the playground, who seems to need a smile as much as the narrator did earlier. Here’s a satisfying chance to pay it forward, and that’s exactly how this sweet picture book concludes.

Sure to elicit smiles.