Some Sunny Day

Deep in the lockdown experiences of early Covid-19, 10-year-old Cymbeline Igloo, star of Boy Underwater, undergoes new experiences in his London neighborhood, despite circumstantial limitations. Cym, who’s been isolating at home with his mum, is feeling at loose ends. He can’t play footie with his best friend Lance, or even, due to the flour shortage, enjoy Sunday morning pancakes. Though Cym’s mother is engaged to their neighbor, he and his two daughters are stuck in New Zealand, and she’s using her worry-fueled hours at home to do a deep cleaning—including of Cym’s room. When the cleaning results in the loss of a beloved object, and Mrs. Stebbings, the school’s “chief dinner lady,” is hospitalized with Covid, Cym’s world continues to tip uncomfortably. Depicting new predicaments and opportunities brought on by the pandemic, Baron (This Wonderful Thing) deploys narrator Cym’s variable emotional landscape to capture localized day-to-day experiences—the joys of a misty early morning London park and the limitations of Zoom—as well as the state of the larger world. Characters read as white. Ages 9–12. (Oct.)