Supposing...

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

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Description

Age range 4 to 8

Follow unexpected possibilities on fanciful and humorous journeys, powered by the limitlessness of the imagination and the openness of the human spirit.

SUPPOSING I looked in the mirror one day and saw someone who wasnt me at all
SUPPOSING I sailed around the world and when I was a mile from my hometown, I just turned the boat and sailed round again the other way
SUPPOSING...

Supposing leads to pondering a chain of hypothetical events that play with the way that things are, daring to imagine a world beyond the laws of physics and unbeholden to societal conventions. Each sentence may start with the same word 'SUPPOSING', but its impossible to predict where the zany musings will lead!

Alastair Reids text, still as delightful and fresh as it was in 1960, is accompanied by new, dazzlingly vibrant illustrations from JooHee Yoon.

Reviews

For a vivid and beguiling new edition, artist JooHee Yoon has revisited, reordered and re-illustrated Reids original text. The result is a flowing series of conjectures, some playful and others faintly ominous, amid pictures that all but vibrate with bold hues of papaya, orange, teal and hunter green About some of Reids writing theres a sense of dark mischief that does not so much date the text as show how virtuous and safety-oriented childrens books have become in the intervening decades. Its hard to imagine any contemporary author being willing to suggest, let alone validate, such naughtiness as: Supposing I telephoned people I didnt know in the middle of the night and practiced my horrible sounds over the phone. Wall Street Journal

The books voice is that of childrenwho wonder and imagine and suppose without (gloriously) considering the consequences These arethe voices ofchildren who wonder what it would be like to save the day; seek solitude; imagine possibilities; defy expectations; do the opposite of what theyre told; confound (and bamboozle) adults; travel through time; keep secrets; and much more. Deliciously, there are also children who imagine the possibilities when not following the rules Even if a lot of their literature (still) tries to represent their thoughts in sanitized, innocent ways, children are capable of ones that are cruel or unkind or stingy,like all humans, and what a breath of fresh air it must be for them to see that acknowledged in a book. Theyre only thoughts after all; none of these speakers in the book act upon them. How cathartic for readers. Children contain multitudes. This book is a powerful reflection on that. I love to see Yoons arresting, distinctive artwork with its vivid stylishness. Here, the colors pop; the scale is often exaggerated; the compositions are visually arresting. Look closely, too, and see that the children often have mischief on their faces, as it should be. Julie Danielson, Seven Impossible Things

"In her transformative spin onNew Yorkerwriter [Reid]s 1960 childs-eye classic, Yoon has added a girl and a dog, reordered the 'what-if' scenarios to better connect them and, brilliantly, illustrated the book as if kids themselves were the artists."New York Times

"Reid's 1960 thought experiments have lost none of their ability to jump-start flights of fancy... Some'Supposing there were 12 of me...' or 'Supposing I taught my dog how to read...'are fun... and others envision empowering acts like saving Dad from financial ruin or helping to recapture an escaped lion... Supposing... a new generation of readers took this invitation to heart to write themselves into different stories" Kirkus

"Newly reissued with fresh illustrations, this book of musings alternates between a pair of little boy and little girl narrators who take turns supposing various scenarios...The illustrations resemble old-fashioned lithography, with simple shapes and backdrops, filled with bright colors and interesting textures. The pictures are large and humorous, with lots of captivating details; I certainly enjoyed leafing through its pages...The art is attractive and lively, and the open-ended nature of the questions could serve as a good writing prompt."Susan Harari, Keefe Library, Boston Latin School (Boston, MA),Youth Services Book Review

Author Bio

Alastair Reid was a poet, a prose chronicler, a translator, and a traveler. Born in Scotland, he came to the United States in the early 1950s, began publishing his poems in the New Yorker in 1951, and for the next fifty-odd years was a traveling correspondent for that magazine. Having lived in both Spain and Latin America for long spells, he became a constant translator of poetry from the Spanish language, in particular the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. In his lifetime, he published more than forty books, among them a classic wordbook for children, Ounce Dice Trice, with drawings by Ben Shahn. In 2008, he published in the U.K. two career-spanning volumes, Outside In: Selected Prose and Inside Out: Selected Poetry and Translations. His Barefoot: The Collected Poems was published posthumously in 2018. The substance of Supposing... he gleaned from the many children who have influenced him, to all of whom he owes and dedicates the text.

JooHee Yoon is an illustrator and printmaker committed to the art of bookmaking. She enjoys combining illustration with design whenever possible and using both traditional and industrial printing techniques for her projects. Rather than a single approach, she tries to match the tone of each project. She strives to create picture books that work on many levels and can be enjoyed by people of all ages.