This Is Sadie

As in previous collaborations like When You Were Small and Where You Came From, O’Leary and Morstad put forth a playful, imagination-first portrait of childhood, introducing a girl named Sadie who is equally at home in the expanses of her mind as she is in the outside world. Striking an irreverent tone from the first page (“This is Sadie. No, not that. That’s a box. Sadie is inside the box”), O’Leary follows her raven-haired heroine as she sets sail in the aforementioned cardboard box, spends the day with friends (“Some of them live on her street, and some live in the pages of books”), and inserts herself into the stories she reads. “She has been a boy raised by wolves,” writes O’Leary as Morstad shows Sadie and a small pack of wolves howling on the jungle floor. Throughout, the warm, understated writing and rich, mixed-media illustrations emphasize that Sadie can be anything or anyone she wants—a snail, the Mad Hatter, a fairy-tale hero—and that, by extension, every reader wields the very same power. Ages 3–7. [em]Author's agent: Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists. Illustrator’s agent: Emily van Beek, Folio Literary Management. (May) [/em]