By Patricia MacLachlan
A farm boy is walked through all the places his family loves, the river, the hayloft, the marsh, the hills, and at the end he passes the gift of them on to his newborn sister, the way it was passed to him.
Eli was born on a farm, and this is the quiet, tender story of how his family teaches him to love it, one place at a time. His grandmother holds him up to the window the day he's born so the first thing he sees is the land. His grandfather shows him the barn and the cool river. His mother loves the marsh where the cattails clack; his father loves the high hills where you can see the whole valley. Each person carries a place inside them, and one by one they hand those places to Eli, until he has a map of loved things stitched right through him. Then his baby sister Sylvie arrives, and on the last pages Eli climbs to the barn and carves her name beside his own, ready to show her, when she's big enough, all the places to love. Patricia MacLachlan's words are pure poetry and Mike Wimmer's paintings glow like late-afternoon light; together they make an ordinary farm feel like the whole tender world.
Read this to a child at the end of a year, or the end of anything, and it does something rare: it teaches that the way to hold onto a place you love is to name it and to pass it on. That's the whole shape of the book, a family handing down their loved places to the next child, and it turns out to be a beautiful idea to carry into a goodbye. It's also simply a gorgeous, generation-spanning story about home and belonging, the kind that rewards a slow read and gives a thoughtful child a lot to feel. For a class leaving a grade behind, it opens an easy door to naming the places, and people, they've loved this year.