By Joan Sweeney
A girl draws a map of her own bedroom, then pulls back one step at a time until she can put a finger on herself in the world.
A girl sits on her bedroom floor and draws her room. Bed, table, door. Then she draws her house with her room inside it. Then her street with her house on it, her town with her street in it, her state, her country, the world. Every page is the same picture from further away, and the thing your child is watching is their own place staying put while the frame widens. Then she runs it backwards, world down to bedroom, and finds herself again. Thirty-two pages, one idea, done.
This is the idea every other book about maps takes for granted, and plenty of six-year-olds do not have it: that a map is a real place drawn from above, and that they are standing on one right now. Sweeney does it with no vocabulary lesson and no key to memorise. She just repeats the same move seven times until it clicks. Qin Leng's 2018 pictures are loose and warm and full of ordinary streets, so the widening never feels like a diagram.