By David Wiesner
A storm knocks the big elm down in the night, and two brothers spend the next week turning it into a jungle, a pirate ship, and a rocket before the men with the saws show up.
The sky goes gray, the leaves come off the trees sideways, and David and George's family brings the cat in and eats supper by the fire while the wind works on the house all night. In the morning the storm has gone and the enormous elm is lying across the neighbor's yard, roots in the air. And that is where the book actually starts. The two brothers climb into it and it becomes a jungle with something watching them from the leaves, then a ship with pirates coming over the rail, then a rocket. Nobody makes them come in. Then one afternoon the men arrive with saws and take the tree away in pieces, and the boys sit on the steps with nothing. Their father comes out and tells them there's another storm on the way, and the two of them look over at the huge maple in their own yard.
Almost nothing here is explained, which is what makes it worth having in a room full of books that explain. Your child gets a storm from the inside of a house, the way a child actually gets one: the sky changes, the grown-ups do something, you eat by the fire, and in the morning the world outside has been rearranged. Then Wiesner spends most of the pages on what the brothers invent, so the storm turns into the best week of their year. It's the version of weather that lives in the body rather than in the sky.