April Pulley Sayre's (Rah, Rah, Radishes!) arresting photographs and precisely chosen words take readers through a rainstorm, start to finish.
First, a tree frog peers out from the inside of a leaf and seems to make eye contact with its audience: "Rain is coming./ You can feel it/ in the air." Two pages later, "Insects take cover." A grasshopper dominates the spread, perching on a red leaf amid drops of rain; on the right, in separate photos, appear "a firefly below a leaf" and "a fly inside a pod." A rash of golden flowers behind the pod helps children see the fly's golden eye and the firefly's stripe (have you ever seen one in daylight?). Later, a bluebird embraces the rain, looking toward an image of a stream dotted with raindrop undulations: "It patters./ It spatters." A stunning trio of photographs depicts a dragonfly at rest, its powder-blue body creating a triangle of primary colors with a red rose and the center of a daisy in the other two photos: "Yet raindrops remain./ They gather./ They glob together." Raindrops transform spider webs into chandeliers ("They cling to curves") and "cover cocoons." In the closing double-page spread, a bee finds purchase on a flower as "raindrops slowly dry"; its golden fuzz matches the petals.
In the endnotes, Sayre explains the various roles rain plays in her photographs. "Raindrops aren't really the tear shape shown in cartoons and diagrams," she writes. "Water molecules... cling together to make a sphere shape." A gorgeous close-up view of rain's effects on nature. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness