Love, Sophia on the Moon

This epistolary story opens with Sophia sitting in a time-out that she is not going to take lying down. In her first letter following the incident, she informs her mother that she’s headed to the moon with her orange cat, Mr. Wubbles. “Don’t try to stop me,” she writes. “Oh no!” Mom replies. “That’s a shame. I was about to make cookies. Now who will lick the beater?” Sophia frolics in Song’s (Ho’onani Hula Warrior) purple-hued lunar landscape, dancing through the sky with floating “moonicorns.” But when Mom announces that she’s found a new occupant for Sophia’s bed—a moon kid named Grorg—her daughter begins to show signs of homesickness beneath her enthusiastic exterior. Gradually, the clever, unhurried parent wins her daughter back—but, in a nice twist, is willing to meet Sophia right where she is, both emotionally and spatially. Text by Rissi (Watch Out for Wolf!) gently portrays the stubborn flight and the resulting plight of a frustrated child, and a mother whose measured responses and funny nuggets of rhetoric show that she loves her child to the moon—and “all the way back.” Ages 3–5. [em]Author’s agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore & Co. Illustrator’s agent: Erica Rand Silverman, Stimola Literary Studio. (Mar.) [/em]