By Daniel Miyares
A wordless picture book: a boy sails a paper boat through the rain, loses it down the storm drain, and his father dries him off and folds the wet page into something new.
There are no words in this one, so the pictures do all the talking. A father folds a sheet of newspaper into a boat and hands it to his son, who pulls on a yellow raincoat and heads out into the rain. For a while it's pure joy: puddles, water rushing along the curb, the little boat riding the current with the boy running alongside it. Then the water speeds up. The boat gets away from him, races toward the storm drain, and slips down through the grate, and the boy ends up on his knees at the edge holding nothing at all. He walks home soaked and hands his father the wet gray lump of paper. His father wraps him in a towel, dries his hair, and folds that ruined page into something new. The sun comes out, and the last pages are a paper airplane climbing into a clear sky. The endpapers even show you how to fold the boat yourself.
Because there are no words, the whole story lives in the boy's body: his shoulders, his hands, the tilt of his head. A child has to actually look at him to know what's happening, which makes this a good pick for one who's just learning to read a face. Miyares helps. The yellow raincoat is the only bright thing on an otherwise gray page, so your child's eye lands right where the feeling is. And the boat doesn't come back — the father doesn't produce a new one or explain it away, he just dries his son off and folds the ruined page into something new.