By Pat Zietlow Miller
A rolling, rhyming ode to roads and the places they lead, following a little rabbit out into the wide world and back home again.
Roads, this book says, can carry you almost anywhere. They wind and climb and cross bridges, they lead toward new friends and sights you'd never catch from your own front step, and this one follows a little rabbit as he sets off down one. There isn't much of a plot. It's a string of rhyming lines about where a road can take you, set in Eliza Wheeler's warm, golden, lantern-lit landscapes. What holds it together is the promise it circles back to at the end: a road leads you out into the world, and the same road leads you home. It's a bon voyage in verse, the book you reach for when a child is about to step into something new, a new grade, a new town, a whole open summer.
The rhythm does most of the work. It's built to be read out loud, and the rhyme keeps a whole room moving together, which is why teachers reach for it at the end of a school year. It's a good pick for a send-off that's a little scary as well as exciting: it names the road ahead, makes it sound inviting, then reminds you that roads lead home again too. Read it to a child leaving a grade or a whole summer behind, and it makes the going feel like something to look forward to.