Cave Paintings

The pale-skinned child who narrates this story by previous collaborators Buitrago and Yockteng (Two White Rabbits) isn’t fazed by the trans-galactic spaceship trip he takes in these pages; he does it all the time, “always traveling alone.” At his destination planet, which readers will recognize as Earth, a small saucer flies him straight into the arms of his grandmother. Every spread juxtaposes natural and futuristic elements: in one, the boy and grandmother travel in a glass-domed vehicle to a preserve-like area, where she leads him into a cave full of paintings. A print of a human hand and images of animals impress him, and so does the grandmother’s present of a family heirloom, a box of colored pencils—“They were my grandfather’s, and before that, his grandfather’s.” Making marks on paper has power that eons can’t diminish; en route home, even the four-eyed passenger in the seat behind the protagonist is riveted by his sketching. Yockteng juggles different styles of artwork with ease—magisterial views of whirling galaxies, pen-and-ink-style drawings of the boy’s time with his grandmother, the cave art itself, and childlike sketches on the new pad all offer scope for the imagination. Ages 4–7. [em](Oct.) [/em]