Be Still, Life

Part mindfulness meditation, part delirious flight of fancy, this unusual picture book encourages readers to pause, quiet down, and take in the world, senses open. In each spread, the rhyming text offers a suggestion to notice the worlds within worlds that reveal themselves when a watcher simply observes: “Be still, life, be still/ like the surface of a pond/ and you’ll see the fish/ swim through/ the clouds and the fronds!” In subsequent spreads, readers are called to quiet their bodies to feel their hearts move, and even, in a nearly solid-black spread, imagine the mysterious “something” that can be sensed, even in seeming “nothing.” The rhyming lines occasionally scan awkwardly, and the contrasting, abstract concepts—the something in nothing; the idea that “everything is still and moving”—may hit home most with an older audience. But Hale (the Who Did It books) creates winsome expressions in the plants, fruits, and creatures that fill her sherbet-colored pages, and the text’s surprising blend of profound questions and wild goofiness forms a unique invitation to delight in life and its smallest wonders. Ages 4–up. (May)