Explorers
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell, Explorers is a new picture book about an extraordinary trip to a museum.
When a family goes to a local museum, a boy notices a homeless man sitting outside, making brightly colored origami birds. He convinces his dad to buy a bird the man makes just for him.
Once inside the museum, his little sister takes the bird and launches it into the air. Is it lost? Soon another boy helps him look, and the paper bird brings two families—and two new friends—together.
With the style he used in Wolf in the Snow, Matthew Cordell shows how an ordinary family outing can be both extraordinary and magical.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this wordless adventure from Caldecott Medalist Cordell (Wolf in the Snow), a white boy sets out with his family father, mother, younger sibling to a natural history museum, stopping on the way in to buy a wind-up flying toy from a street vendor seated beneath a sign that reads "Magic." It flies beautifully, murmuring "KSSSSHH," and the boy can't resist launching it inside, past the dinosaurs and the statues, until another boy, whose family has brown skin and whose mother and younger sister wear hijabs, catches it deftly. The owner snatches it back, and his father scolds him. He's crushed; Cordell shows him with his family on a bench, drinking his juice, a faraway stare in his eyes. Cordell resolves the story slowly, in small steps, as the two families meet again and become better acquainted. In loosely drawn panels, the boy's shifting emotions make him easy to empathize with as he's by turns baffled, tense, and vexed by the conflict between wanting his toy and wanting to be generous. As readers see him loosening his boundaries to become a more bighearted version of himself, the moment feels welcome and real. Ages 2 6.
