From Here to There: A First Book of Maps

At the start of this cartographic picture book by French (the Knight in Training series), young Zane, portrayed with brown skin, sends his pale-skinned friend Anna an invitation to visit him, along with a hand-drawn map from her home to his. “Clever Zane,” says Anna’s father; “But he’s put his house in the middle,” Anna objects, “and our house on the very edge. That’s not right.” As Anna draws her own version, running into issues with orientation and scale, her father shows her variations via a printed map (“Imagine you’re a bird.... This is how you’d see things when you looked down”) and a family tree. Notes throughout elucidate map-related concepts (“The size of things on a map, compared to real life, is called the map’s scale”) as the story moves toward its end, in which Anna confidently leads her father to Zane’s home. Huang (And I Think About You) paints the figures in a loose, naturalistic style, and shows the maps close-up, clearly distinguishing between various iterations. It’s a subtle look at the documents’ inherent subjectivity that may inspire readers to pursue projects of their own. Ages 3–7. (May)