Blue Rider

This wordless story opens with a spread of city buildings in quiet blues and grays. A girl stands at an apartment window surrounded by dozens of identical windows. Venturing outside, she’s jostled by crowds of people staring at their phones, listening to music, or walking their dogs and babies. Suddenly, she spots a book on the street, picks it up, and holds it close. That night in bed she opens it; readers view it with her. Across its pages gallops a blue horse with mane and tail like fireworks—orange, yellow, magenta. It leaps from the pages and across the city sky, shedding shapes of turquoise, magenta, and lime. The colors and shapes that make up the horse grow bigger and brighter, dissolving into increasingly abstract collages. At last the girl is seen on the horse herself, galloping away. Back in her room, she closes her eyes in blissful reflection. Like an urban companion to his rural dreamscape adventure, Turn on the Night, Valério’s fantasy offers the girl all the splendor that’s missing from her cookie-cutter surroundings. It’s a dazzling vision of the way art transcends the everyday. Ages 4–7. (Mar.)