I Can Open It for You

In another lucidly conceived flight of imagination, Yoshitake (I Can Be Anything) considers the power to open things—an act that’s often, due to packaging or supervision, denied to young children. The narrator, clad in red overalls, grimaces and scowls while wrestling with the foil wrapper around a piece of chocolate before taking it to their mother, who opens it with a practiced flick of the fingers. “When I get a little bit bigger... I’ll be able to open anything,” the child muses, and the book is off to the races, pushing the notion of opening powers into the zone of the improbable. The now-powerful child runs down a queue of people of all ages who need assistance, and several spreads show bottles, tins, and packages opening one by one, accompanied by onomatopoeia rendered skillfully by translator Wilcut: “phssst” “shwoop” “shwifft.” More momentous events follow as the child brandishes a star-tipped wand, opening a bank safe, a rock revealing a giant fossil, a scary costume (unveiling the human inside, the better to reassure a crying child), an entire house, and more. The diagram-like clarity of Yoshitake’s line drawings contributes a distinctive pleasure to this humorous small-scale superhero adventure about personal autonomy and growing up. Characters read as East Asian. Ages 3–5. (Sept.)