Heart String

With light verse, whispery artwork, and a single, rainbow-hued line that loops and soars through the pages, Boynton-Hughes (Brave Molly) introduces the idea that all human beings are linked. “There is a string,” the narrator starts, addressing the reader directly, “an invisible string,/ that ties my heart/ to yours.” A child and adult, portrayed with brown skin, hug before the child sets off for a nearby community garden, wagon in tow. The titular string—which reads clearly as a conceptual element rather than a literal one—starts at the child’s hoodie and leaps off the edge of the page, connecting the youth to an elderly, white-presenting neighbor. Soon, the child is seen working in the garden within a bustling neighborhood, the cord glowing gold as it passes through individuals and groups portrayed with varying abilities and skin tones. Pulling farther out, Boyton-Hughes draws the line swirling across an ocean and desert, around the earth, and back at last to the neighborhood, where the hoodie-clad child offers the neighbor garden vegetables, acknowledging their connection: “My heart to yours,/ and yours to mine.” An upbeat variation on Karst and Lew-Vriethoff’s The Invisible String, Boynton-Hughes’s work offers a glad vision of a world connected. Ages 3–5. Agent: Marietta B. Zacker, Gallt & Zacker Literary. (Dec.)