The Wildest Thing

Nature-based play unleashes a sense of possibility in this meditative picture book about a wilderness-lover’s path to embracing the “something/ wild inside of her,// waiting to come out.” After a night of dreams featuring “things with fur and fin,” rhythmic text describes the way nature begins to seep into young Eleanor’s routine. Breakfast occurs on a couch visualized as a large brown bear, and a moment spent quietly gives way to less constrained wishes: “She wanted to be noisy!/ She wanted to be free./ She wanted to be wilder/ than she was supposed to be.” Eleanor next takes flight via monarch wings, and Winfield Martin (The Imaginaries) charts the ensuing day with alliterative verbs as well as delicate artwork that emphasizes the child’s creaturely connections. (The pale-skinned figure’s two dark eyes peer out from a blanket fort as a deer looks on.) Employing a mix of colored pencil, gouache, and acrylic, subtly surrealistic renderings mingle natural and human elements for an effect that gestures toward Eleanor’s psychological transformation. A suitably untamed bedtime sequence winds down, yielding a thoroughly heartening portrait of a child abandoning inhibition. Ages 3–7. (Jan.)