My Garden (review)

Our young narrator dutifully assists her mother in their backyard garden, but the little girl really prefers her fantasized garden, wherein "the flowers could change color just by my thinking about it" and "if I planted seashells, I'd grow seashells." She happily describes the myriad wonders of her imagined botanical wonderland, and come nighttime she decides to take a quick chance on fantasy, "planting" a seashell in the soil ("Who knows what might happen?"). This is more an idyll than a story, since there's not really a plot, but the text evinces a genuine understanding of the pleasures and strains of gardening; the imaginary garden's details are believable kid adaptations ("And the carrots would be invisible because I don't like carrots"). Henkes returns here to the illustrative style he employed in A Good Day (BCCB 5/07), big, friendly figures with thick, sturdy borders (in dark blue here, with virtually no black apparent in the images), and there's a multiplicity of quick small botanical detail in the garden scene. While more contrast could have been visually made between the real and the imagined, there's a sweet Easter-basket festivity to the grape, cherry, and green-apple tones of the watercolor fantasy that's bound to appeal to youngsters. Use this to plant the seed for a discussion about the nature of the audience's imaginary gardens, or just for a fantastical outdoor break during a cold stretch of unpleasant weather.