But I will always be there when you land.” Narrator: “What if the world around us is filled with hate?” Road: “Lead it to love.” Narrator: “What if I feel stuck?” Road: “Keep going.” De Moyencourt illustrates this colloquy with luminous scenes of a small, brown-skinned child, face turned away from viewers so all they see is a mop of blond curls. “Everyone falls at some point, said the Road. The Road’s dialogue and the narration are set in a chunky, sans-serif type with no quotation marks, so the one flows into the other confusingly. “What if I fall?” worries the narrator in a stylized, faux hand-lettered type Wade’s Instagram followers will recognize. The Road’s twice-iterated response-“Be a leader and find out”-bookends a dialogue in which a traveler’s anxieties are answered by platitudes. Opening by asking readers, “Have you ever wanted to go in a different direction,” the unnamed narrator describes having such a feeling and then witnessing the appearance of a new road “almost as if it were magic.” “Where do you lead?” the narrator asks. (This book was reviewed digitally.)įrom an artist, poet, and Instagram celebrity, a pep talk for all who question where a new road might lead. Though it wraps up a bit neatly, those grappling with their own anxieties may find Colagiovanni’s words of wisdom useful. So…I decided to go left.” The decision alone allows a box full of worries-depicted as small, red monsters-to be left behind…followed by a bag of hairy green doubts and, at the bottom of a high-diving platform, both a suitcase of jagged orange fears and a backpack of beaky yellow frustrations yelling, “You can’t do it!” and “Give up already!” But after taking the plunge and suddenly realizing that going left eventually made everything go right, the narrator discovers that all the embodied bugaboos have shrunk so much that it’s easy to take them up again. Absolutely, positively, NOTHING was going right. “One day, for no particular reason, nothing was going right. A simple strategy for lightening the weight of worries, doubts, fears, and frustrations.įor all that Reynolds depicts a young child (brown-skinned, with Afro-textured hair) walking along a road shedding bags and other luggage in the simply drawn illustrations, Colagiovanni’s allegorical wordplay seems addressed more to audiences that are old enough to see their lives in abstract terms.
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