But HOW DO I... Fly! by Mark Teague

This fledgling flight denier thinks he's got it all figured out.

THE NEST IS BEST!

It's been a cinch since he hatched. He waits in the nest and Mama Robin brings him breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. What's not to like?

The only problem is the lack of scintillation in his diet. Worms for every meal and snack? Bo-RING!

!!!

Baby Robin is the avian contrarian version of the terrible twos! Mama Robin is fatigued and frazzled with her youngster's tantrums!

But--OOPS! Baby Robin's little food fit flips him right out of the nest. He flutters and flops all the way to the ground. Now what?

Mama suggests he flap his wings and fly back up to the nest. Baby suggests she carry him back up on her back. Mama suggests he try flapping his own wings. Baby is stubborn. He's oppositional. He's a classic case of FAILURE TO FLEDGE!

He summons up images of alternative modes of flight--from piggy-back to pogo stick, from hot-air balloon to vintage aircraft. from super-hero soaring to ski jumping. Mama is steamed. Enough of this silliness. Autumn is coming. She's ready to fly to Florida--soon. Baby suggests alternate means of travel--

Orange Blossom Special? Skateboard? Little Red Convertible?

Mama Robin decides it's time to stop this stonewalling and scare her litigious little fledgling straight!

Cat? (Yawn!) Dog? (Piece of cake!)

OWL?.... YIKES!!!!!!!

It's up, up, and away for this reluctant little launcher, in best-selling author-illustrator, Mark Teague's latest, Fly! (Beach Lane Books, 2019). Mama knows best in this terrific wordless story, and although simple enough for a savvy toddler who understands the concept of speech bubbles, preschoolers can "read" this one with ease, and even older kids will giggle at the graphic absurdities and the subtleties of this war of the wills.

Teague, the illustrator of Cynthia Rylant's top-selling  Poppleton series, Teague's own Mrs. LaRue series, and Jane Yolen's uber-popular How Do Dinosaurs... (see reviews here), is a modern master of illustrative humor, and as Publishers Weekly's starred review says, "Teague proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words--and almost as many laughs."

High Hopes! The Almost Impossible Thing by Basak Aguoglu

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A DREAM.

A DREAM THAT TRIED TO TAKE SHAPE.

Birds do it. They fly through the sky. Why not a rabbit?

Little rabbit works with what he's got--long ears. But there's no liftoff, no matter how hard he flaps them like a bird or rotates them like a maple helicopter. He can't get off the ground.

He adds feathers and faces into wind. No luck. He tries skiing off a ski jump and ends up cooling his heels in a snow bank. He hang-glides off a cliff, but still finds that the law of gravity trumps high hopes every time.

Rabbit goes up and ... down.

He gets the gear--helmet and goggles and all--but it's still a no go. Should he tuck his dream away in a tiny box?

"You can do anything if you try!" they say. "Dream BIG!" they say.

In a true "flight of fancy," a charmingly envisioned little rabbit takes off into the wild blue yonder in Basak Aguoglu's little parable of dreaming big. Unlike Dumbo, the flying elephant of Disney fame, for this little rabbit, equipped as he is with a pair of inauspicious skinny ears, independent flight seems impossible, no matter how hard he flaps or rotates his ears. There's no solo flight in his future.

So our bunny thinks outside his box. If he can't realize his dream of solo flight, perhaps there could be success in a crowd-sourcing configuration. If he can just get enough flight-fancying rabbits together in an aerodynamic form, maybe they can get his dream off the ground....

Basak Aguoglu's The Almost Impossible Thing (Philomel Books, 2017) puts in a plug for big dreams, for creative thinking, and for getting by with a little help from your friends, in a fancifully styled tale that provides fun along the way in its light and loose illustrations, done in blackline and bright gouache accents, with an admittedly cute little hero with twenty-one look-alike buddies who come to share his dream. It's a strange story with pleasantly free-floating artwork and design that makes it all seem somehow possible, if not all that likely. But after all, even youngsters will intuit that this is less a how-to manual and more of a fable for the more imaginative mind. "A difficult but rewarding debut," says Kirkus Reviews.

Flight of Fancy: The Almost Impossible Thing by Basak Agaoglu

A day when rabbits fly?

It seems an incredible, impossible vision, but a little long-eared rabbit watches a bird fly across the sky, and she has a sudden yen....

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A DREAM.

She flaps her impressively long ears, but there's no lift off.

It's time to go back to the old drawing board, and Rabbit does, chalking up designs and computations, until she has some promising possibilities.

Maybe she can get a lot of lift from bouncing high on a trampoline.

No. It's right back down to earth. She constructs some feathery wings.

How about soaring on her skiis off the ski jump? She's airborne, wings outspread, but not for long, as her parabola lands her deep in a snowbank.

That was fun while it lasted, but she needs a little help. How about a kite? It has lift, lots of it--until it lands in The inevitable tree.

But the impossible dream remains. Perhaps if she could enlist enough rabbits with flapping ears and a dream like hers....

LOTS OF RABBITS!

Where there's a will, there's a way, in Basak Aguoglu's The Almost Impossible Thing (Philomel Books, 2017), in which our rabbity protagonist rockets off into the wild blue yonder. It's definitely a flight of fancy, in an imaginative picture book that offers dreamy illustrations, little rocket science, and some crowd sourcing, along with a chance for young readers to spread their wings and follow the dream. Agaoglu's illustrations combine simple but stylized line drawings of sky-struck rabbits surrounded by a flowing colors and minimalist scenery, the stuff that dreams are made of. "A rewarding debut..." says Kirkus Review.

Take Off! Aerospace Engineering (Baby Loves) by Ruth Spiro

HOW DO BIRDS FLY?

Tiny tots notice right away that birds do something special, doubtlessly asking the same question that little Leonardo da Vinci must have asked. How DO birds stay up and travel through the air? And the natural follow-up query.... Can I DO that?

Taking advantage of that wonder, Ruth Spiro's Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering! (Baby Loves Science) helps the very young let their curiosity carry them far, describing how the aerodynamic shape of the bird's wings allows air to move more slowly above her curved wing than below, providing lift.

Then the curious kid wonders if the same is true for airplane wings.

DOES AN AIRPLANE FLAP ITS WINGS?

Spiro explains that airplanes need engines to provide speed so that the shape of their wings, like the bird's, allow them to ride the air above the earth. With an accompanying drawing, the effect of lift is explained. But how about higher above the earth? How can a bird fly into space? Her wings won't do it!

SORRY, BIRD!

That takes a rocket with a large engine that makes hot gas to provide the thrust to take bird (and people) into space.

Spiro's Baby Loves book is planned to pique the interest of the youngest in the basics of flight, with a trajectory from the toddler's ground level into outer space. It's the Bernoulli effect and Newton's laws of motion in a suitably simplified nutshell. With engaging but simple illustrations by Irene Chan, this tot-friendly little board book encourages the natural curiosity of the toddler to lift off into the scientific side of the natural world all around.

Tough Love! Nope! A Tale of First Flight by Drew Sheneman

"Fish got to swim,

Birds got to fly...."

But maybe not this bird.

One look down... down.... down... and ... down ... from the nest and this wary little parrot scoots back, trying to get back under Mama's wing.

The sky is huge and his wings are so small. And what's down there?

Slavering gray wolves? Prowling orange cats? Circling CROCODILES?

NO WAY!

Mama gives him THE LOOK through veiled lids. She tilts her head to indicate some fearless fledglings faithfully taking to their wings from a nearby nest. Everything about her body language says Come on, sonny, you're a BIRD. Get with the program.

Junior looks over the edge of the nest again. It's a long way to anywhere from there. Look how little his wings are? How many ways can he say NO! He tries saying in in Spanish. In German. In Russian.

NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!

He has a squawking, flapping tizzy of a tantrum.

The fainthearted fledgling huddles next to an exasperated Mama Parrot. There is a sly look on her face as she picks up her offspring, gives him a great big smackeroo on his cute little baby bill, and then...

Boots him out of the nest!

BOOP!

Mother knows best, in Drew Sheneman's comic lesson in avian tough love, NOPE (Viking Books, 2017). Author Sheneman's career skills as a cartoonist are put to good use in his first picture book venture, told in nothing but negative words, in assorted languages, letting the facial expressions and body language of his characters do the narrating. Fish are born in their element, but for birds, flying is a leap of faith they must elect to take.

Sheneman's illustrations, with his funny cartoon characters center stage, sunny greenery and beckoning blue sky in the background, give this one a benevolent ambiance despite its hard-nosed premise. Kids with empathize with the little parrot, reluctant to make that big step off into thin air but will ultimately cheer, as Sheneman's skittish chick falls, flutters, flaps, and finally has that first flight. With a smug, self-satisfied Yep, Mama settles back in her now empty nest, but her young one also gives her the air as he flies back up, bids Mama a fond farewell, and soars away into the wild blue yonder.

Lighter Than Air: Anything Is Possible by Giulia Belloni

... A SHEEP, FROM THE TOP OF HER HILL, WATCHED THE BIRDS FLY AND THOUGHT TO HERSELF:

"HOW LUCKY THEY ARE! THEY CAN CHOOSE HOW THEY LOOK AT THINGS: FROM FAR AWAY, FROM UP CLOSE, OR FROM SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN."

Sheep decides that she must build a flying machine, and inexplicably, decides that Wolf is the logical partner in this endeavor.

In addition to that uncomfortable thing about predators and prey, Wolf is a bad match as a partner. Sheep is a woolly-headed dreamer. Wolf is a confirmed realist. With irony he tosses a paper airplane made from a piece of newspaper, leaving a contrail of computations behind it.

"DO YOU THINK IT'S THAT SIMPLE?"

But despite his understandable doubts, Wolf finds himself drawn into Sheep's fantastical concept. With compass and protractor they draw up complicated diagrams--gears, struts, flywheels, and formulas. Their first attempt, to be lifted aloft on fabric wings whose design seems lifted straight from Da Vinci, fails when the fabric rips and they fall back to earth. Their second design, lifted by balloons, attracts a flock of birds, who apparently resent the intrusion of their airspace and peck all the balloons until they pop. Kerplop!

Is anything possible? With two physically feasible flying machines in shreds, it does not seem that the final plan, more balloons lifting a wagon-styled gondola cut from a dragon pattern has anything to recommend it as airworthy, in Giulia Belloni's Anything Is Possible (OwlKids, 2013), but the dragon keeps the birds at bay long enough for Sheep to point out

"SOMEONE ONCE WROTE THAT ONLY THOSE WHO DREAM LEARN TO FLY."

In a flight of fancy that will leave literal-minded kids scratching their heads, Belloni's little story actually achieves lift-off through the delightful cut-paper art of illustrator  Marco Trevisan, who tints his pictures appealingly in shades of brown and newsprint gray against creamy white pages. Trevisan sets his two unlikely collaborators, dreamer and realist, in oppositional body language which reveals their at-odds personalities right through to the final page, where the two soar off above the birds, with Wolf, arms still skeptically akimbo, admitting that "Anything is possible." Even the endpapers, penciled pages of algebraic computations and the clever dust jacket endflaps add to the artistry of the story of these unlikely co-pilots. You never know until you try, and  Kirkus Reviews agrees, saying, "Lovely bookmaking nicely complements this charming, light-as-a-feather tale of friendship and successful dreaming."