Everyone Can Learn to Ride a Bicycle by Chris Raschka (review)

In this poetic pep talk for wannabe bike-riders, Raschka pithily and supportively encapsulates the experience of learning to ride a bike. Viewers follow a young, dark-haired girl clad in a blue striped helmet as she picks out the bike, gets started ("Training wheels are helpful"), perseveres in the face of falls, and eventually succeeds under the supervision of the narrating adult. Unfortunately, the directives on the actual bike-riding process are rather glib, offering generalizations (particularly in the title) over concrete advice when it comes to getting the rubber to meet the road. Raschka's bold ink and watercolor illustrations capture both the motion and emotion of the bike riding process, but some of the compositions are rather muddied by the over-abstraction of shape and form. The large, crisp black font, the abundance of creamy white space, and the matte finish of the pages keep the look polished and elegant, however, and the brevity and simplicity of the text makes it useful for younger-aged storytimes or classrooms.