Do You Remember?
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the multiple award-winning creator of Small in the City and the illustrator of I Talk Like a River comes a fresh and moving look at memories, filtered through the mind of a child.
Winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Picture Book Award
Tucked in bed at a new apartment, a boy and his mother trade favorite memories. Some are idyllic, like a picnic with Dad, but others are more surprising: a fall from a bike into soft piled hay, the smell of an old oil lamp when a rainstorm blew the power out.
Now it’s just the two of them, and the house where all those memories happened is far away. But maybe someday, this will be a favorite memory, too: happy and sad, an end and a beginning intertwined.
In a series of warm and wistful vignettes, as achingly fleeting as childhood memories always become, Sydney Smith takes us into the mind of a young person processing a bevy of complex emotions during a major life change. Do You Remember? is a stirring meditation on holding fast to the best of the past, and choosing to believe in the future.
Sydney Smith is the winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international distinction given to authors and illustrators of children's books.
A Charlotte Zolotow Highly Commended Title
A New York Times Best Children's Book of the Year
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year
A Smithsonian Magazine Best Children's Book of the Year
A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year
A Chicago Public Library 'Best of the Best' Book
A Horn Book Fanfare Book
A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith (My Baba's Garden) opens this story of remembrance as a pale-skinned adult and child awaken, lying next to each other, open-eyed in the dark. As the pages turn, limpid dialogue and tender, light-filled vignettes show the two taking refuge in shared memories. "Do you remember," the adult begins, "when we had a picnic in the field?" Sunny scenes show the child searching among daisies "for snakes and bugs" while the sun shines down on the two and a bearded father. A page turn reveals an unexpected prize found by the youth: a handful of wild berries. The duo share more memories—the child learning to ride a bicycle, a rainstorm that knocked out the power—before moving closer to a present in which the father no longer seems to be around ("Do you remember... leaving our home behind?"). Without freighting this portrait of change with context, Smith reveals the two creating a new memory for themselves: the first morning in their new home ("We could smell the bakery from across the street"). It's a loving familial portrait that envisions intentionality around the process of memory-making. Ages 4–8.
