Horn Book

Harold and the Purple Crayon meets twenty-first-century urban realism in this picture book (simultaneously published in Spanish as Milo imagina el mundo) by the Last Stop on Market Street (rev. 1/15) team. Milo, a diminutive brown-skinned boy with round glasses and a lime green hat, boards a subway with his big sister. While she plays games on her phone, Milo studies people and imagines lives for them with his notebook and colored pencils. Robinson’s art alternates between color-saturated, double-page scenes of train activity and Milo’s hand-drawn sketches. Milo draws a suit-wearing boy on the train as a prince arriving at his castle; for a wedding-gown-clad passenger, Milo draws her imagined ceremony. Milo feels more comfortable watching than being watched but wonders what people imagine about him. He then re-imagines and re-illustrates many of his scenes, intentionally looking at his subjects in a different way. Milo and his sister finally reach their destination: a detention center, where they visit their incarcerated mother (the suited boy is visiting someone, too). As in Jacqueline Woodson’s Visiting Day (rev. 11/02), the joy and parent-child love shine through, and the climax comes with Milo’s sharing a special drawing he has created for his mom. This poignant, thought-provoking story speaks volumes for how art can shift one’s perspectives and enable an imaginative alternative to what is…or seems to be. MICHELLE H. MARTIN