Imagine [Hardcover]

A buoyant, breathtaking poem from Juan Felipe Herrera — brilliantly illustrated by Caldecott Honoree Lauren Castillo — speaks to every dreaming heart.

Have you ever imagined what you might be when you grow up? When he was very young, Juan Felipe Herrera picked chamomile flowers in windy fields and let tadpoles swim across his hands in a creek. He slept outside and learned to say good-bye to his amiguitoseach time his family moved to a new town. He went to school and taught himself to read and write English and filled paper pads with rivers of ink as he walked down the street after school. And when he grew up, he became the United States Poet Laureate and read his poems aloud on the steps of the Library of Congress. If he could do all of that . . . what couldyoudo? With this illustrated poem of endless possibility, Juan Felipe Herrera and Lauren Castillo breathe magic into the hopes and dreams of readers searching for their place in life.Lauren Castillo’s perfect illustrations — warm, deftly composed, with the sensual allure of woodcuts—are so captivating they might on their own overcome a ho-hum story. But this poem is a masterly picture book text: Its precisely chosen words create a world you have to listen to, to think about. When at the end you learn that you were being told this boy’s story as a spur to your own potentially amazing one, the surprise and the gratification outweigh any sense of a lesson being taught.
—The New York Times Book Review

Spacious, light-filled spreads by Castillo (Nana in the City) conjure up landscapes of red earth, bright sun, and long views. Herrera writes of the joy of creation and discovery, and says little about the hardships he must have undergone. The story of a brown-skinned boy who “practiced/ spelling words/ in English by/ saying them in Spanish/ like—pehn-seel for/ pencil” reaching recognition as the nation’s most llS