Have You Ever Seen a Flower?

April 1, 2021
A young urbanite romps through floral fields and deep into a flower's anatomy, exploring humanity's connection to nature. A solo car travels away from the dense, gray cityscape. Mountains rise up, full of pattern and light, before revealing a fluorescent field of flowers. A child bursts from the car across the page, neon-rainbow hair streaming in the wind, as both child and place radiate joy and life. The brown-skinned, blue-eyed youngster breathes in the meadow and begins an adventure--part Jamberry, part "Thumbelina," and part existential journey as the child realizes the life force running through the veins of the flower is the same that runs through all of us, from the water that sustains to the sun that grows. Harris' colored-pencil illustrations are full of energy and spontaneity. His use of patterning and graphic symbology evoke Oaxacan design, yet the style is all his own. The text is equally enthusiastic: "Have you ever seen / a flower so deep / you had to shout / HELLO / and listen for an echo / just to know / how deep it goes?" The text shifts abruptly from metaphor to metaphor, in one spread the flower likened to a palace and a few pages later, to human anatomy. Nevertheless, like the protagonist and the natural environment, readers will feel themselves stretch and bloom. A visual feast teeming with life. (Picture book. 3-7)

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May 1, 2021
Preschool-Grade 2 A blue-eyed child, tan with flowing blond hair, escapes the dreary, black-and-gray city for a trip to the country, which bursts with blended layers of neon greens, pinks, yellows, and blues. As the child frolics in flower-laden fields, the reader is addressed with questions about their experience with nature, quickly turning abstract. "Have you ever seen a flower using nothing but your nose? . . . what do you see? Raindrops made of honey? The knees of bumblebees? A fancy lady?" The text takes readers on an imaginative journey inside flowers, activating all the senses and gradually thinning the distance between the human body and nature, until the two become one, prompting readers to imagine themselves as the flower, to feel themselves growing and stretching toward the sun. There's a deep intensity to all the proceedings, rooted in the astounding, dense colored-pencil illustrations and extending to the metaphoric text, which reaches for an odd sort of physical intimacy with the reader. Creative, dazzling, and fearless, Harris' authorial debut marks an auspicious new chapter to his picture-book career.

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