NICE WORK

A child details the family peach tree’s progress, from its sticklike beginnings to its second-year harvest: a single peach.

When the peach-stick’s planted, the youngster’s best friend, Maya, suggests that they plant sticks, too. As the little tree grows roots underground (prodigiously illustrated by Tahboub), more change ensues. The protagonist celebrates a birthday in August, Maya moves in the autumn, and our hero endures a cold, lonely winter. The children write letters—a lovely testimony to nurturing a friendship—and Maya asks about their stick forest. (Tahboub cheekily obliges, providing scribbly, spring-green foliage.) With the arrival of an elder named Ruth the following spring, a mutually welcome bond, liberally sweetened with Ruth’s oatmeal cookies, sprouts between her and the narrator. She describes her childhood cherry tree, which also grew taller than she, maintaining that the tree kept growing while she stopped. Yet she agrees when the child counters, “You grew underneath.” A single flower—“a promise”—appears on the peach tree. In summer, the child shares a peach wedge with Ruth, vowing, “Next year, you get a whole peach.” Imagining the tree after many years, Day’s narrator bestows a final gem: “My tree will be old. But its peaches will always be new.” The child’s different friendships and the tree’s slow maturation yield thematic treasures about growth, change, and aging, anchored by the titular refrain, by turns reflecting sarcasm and genuine pride. Most characters are pale-skinned; Maya is brown-skinned.

Wisdom in a small package.