Just in Case You Want to Fly by Julie Fogliano (review)

The team of Fogliano and Robinson (When's My Birthday?, BCCB 9/17) returns here in another poetic flight of fancy, in this case a sprightly lyric of love and support. In second-person address, the speaker offers the listener wind and the sky "just in case you want to fly," help ranging from a pillow to a kiss on the head come bedtime, a scratch on the back "if you get itchy," and so on. It's a lovely and loving lyric touched with playfulness (there's a "la la la" and a "ding ding ding" "just in case you want to sing") and humor (a fine speedy Dad-joke pun gleefully interrupts the cadence). Robinson's familiar earthtoned paint and collage art balances crisp, geometric forms with softly streaked and dabbed textures; interpretations of the text are inventive (an oxpecker bird atop a luminous pale rhino illustrates the "scratch on the back") and open it up rewardingly and imaginatively, while the multicultural cast of kids in groups and small scenes roots the whimsy in the domestic. Between this and If I Was the Sunshine (BCCB 5/19), Fogliano is rendering the conditional remarkably endearing, and youngsters will want to come along for the fanciful ride.