Paper Chase

A paper plane sparks an imaginative connection in this nested telling from previous collaborators Donaldson and Sandøy (The Christmas Pine). When pale-skinned Ginger’s paper airplane lands on brown-skinned James’s book as he reads beneath the forest’s “tallest tree of all,” mild consternation turns to a wonderful day of creative play. Lilting verse and idyllic illustrations portray the children “kicking the cones,// Building a den,/ and a castle of stones,/ Unfolding the plane/ and making a boat,// Finding a stream and watching it float.” But when their friendship is interrupted, their individual attempts to reunite at the tree are thwarted—until the tree is felled and hauled to a paper mill, where it’s transformed into materials that bring them back together. On the day that James makes a paper airplane from a new pad of paper, it heads out, “almost as though it seems to know/ Exactly where it is planning to go”— straight to a new book that Ginger is reading in the woods. Brimming with intriguing themes about fate and the natural world, it’s a simple tale about what makes and sustains a friendship. Ages 4–8. (Dec.)