The Lost (and Found) Balloon
With Audio Recording
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Where do balloons go when you let them loose? Find out in this whimsical, imaginative tale, winner of the General Mills Spoonful of Stories contest.
Molly O’Doon ties a note to her red balloon, lets it loose, and off it goes on a buoyant adventure. Who will answer Molly’s letter? Someone in a different state or a faraway country? Or maybe, a new friend much closer than she could ever imagine.
The Lost (and Found) Balloon is the winner of the 5th annual Cheerios® New Author Contest. Selected from more than 8,000 entries by a team of editors, teachers, librarians, and General Mills staff, The Lost (and Found) Balloon will also appear in a bilingual (English/Spanish) mini-paperback edition in 1.5 million specially marked boxes of Cheerios.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Molly O'Doon/ had a balloon/ red and shiny and round," and she releases it into the sky with a note attached. Evocative illustrations, suggestive of the view from an ascending plane, track the balloon as it floats above motley fields and the brick-red roofs of a housing development, "Each shrinking house/ small like a mouse." The sun sets, and the balloon drifts over an expanse of water under a full moon, returning with the dawn and settling into the garden of another girl who happens to be Molly's next-door neighbor. Jenkins, winner of the 2011 Cheerios Spoonfuls of Stories author contest, tells the tale in pedestrian rhyming couplets ("Katie McCloat/ sat down, read the note"), but Bogade (Ben's Flying Flowers) provides a modicum of magic with her soaring bird's-eye perspectives and idiosyncratic combinations of negative space and color. After drawing scenery in black line, Bogade tints select details the scarlet balloon, the brassy gold of church bells, a bluebird amid green leaves leaving surrounding areas bare. Like the unfinished coloring book it resembles, however, the narrative proves superficial. Ages 4 8.
