By David Ezra Stein
A girl skips down her street smiling, and the book follows what that smile sets off through six countries before it comes home to her.
Amelia skips down the street smiling, for no reason at all. Mrs. Higgins sees her through the window and it makes her smile, and smiling makes her think of her grandson Lionel away in Mexico, so she posts him a box of cookies. The cookies give Lionel an idea. His idea gives one of his students an idea. And from there it's off: a ballet troupe in England, a goodwill recital in Israel, a rumba struck up in the street in Paris, a man in Italy who finally gets round to proposing, a scarf knitted for a niece in New York. Each page begins with 'because,' each one hangs off the one before it, and the last link in the chain lands back on Amelia's own street.
This is the same idea as Ordinary Mary's Extraordinary Deed done as a story rather than a sum, and if you only want one of the two on your shelf, this is the better-made book. The chain here doesn't multiply, it wanders, which means each link has to be its own small scene with somebody recognizable in it — a grandmother posting cookies, a man who has been meaning to propose for ages. Stein's crayon-and-watercolor spreads are loose and full of things happening at the edges, and children go back to them to find the dog or the cyclist they missed. The text is short and the vocabulary is easy, so it suits a young listener, and the geography gives an older one something to do: six countries in five minutes, and a world map afterwards nearly draws itself.