By Barbara Cooney
When Alice is small, her grandfather asks her to do something someday to make the world more beautiful. This is the story of the whole long life she spends figuring out how.
When Alice is small she sits on her grandfather's knee while he paints, and she tells him that someday she'll travel to faraway places and then live beside the sea, the way he did. Wonderful, he says — but there's a third thing you must do. You must do something to make the world more beautiful. Alice doesn't know yet what that could be, but she promises. The first two she manages: she grows up, works in a library, sails to tropical islands, climbs tall mountains, crosses deserts, and finally settles in a little house by the ocean. But the third promise keeps nagging at her. How do you make the whole world more beautiful? The answer comes slowly, from a hillside of lupines that had seeded themselves in the wind. And Alice — by now the old woman the children call the Lupine Lady — spends her years scattering flower seeds along every road and lane and around the schoolhouse, until whole stretches of the coast come up blue and purple and rose in the summer, more beautiful than she found them.
This is a lovely gift for a teacher or a mentor — someone who's spent years planting good things in children without getting to watch most of them bloom. That handing-down is the book's whole shape: an old woman gives her charge to a young girl, the way her grandfather once gave it to her. For a child, it works more quietly. Over one long, ordinary life, one ordinary person really does leave the world more beautiful, and it never preaches the point once. Cooney's glowing folk-art paintings reward slowing down, and I'd linger on the world-travel spreads especially.