We Always Had Wings

Snow channels their six-year-old self, per an author’s note, in this visually stunning solo picture book debut that sees a child heading to visit family in a Chinese countryside village. As Mama and Little Snow take off in an airplane, the youth shivers (“Maybe we shouldn’t be up so high”) and asks whether the two can’t spend Lunar New Year together at home. In poetic conversational lines, Mama calmly reassures: “Our family expands across borders. We belong in the sky.” Gesturing at a flock of red-crowned cranes just outside the aircraft’s windows, Mama explains that the birds are the child’s aunties. In lushly textured digital images, ancestral spirits vesseled in the bodies of cranes are soon shown traversing a starry sky (“Long ago, when we were birds,/ we soared across the seas”). And as the two reach their destination, they’re depicted riding together on a crane’s back, then joining family at Grandma’s home, where Little Snow is comforted by the understanding that she “belongs not to just one home but to many”—even the sky. Ages 4–8. (Dec.)