With just three words spoken over the span of a walk to the train platform, Antoinette Portis (Not a Box) shows how a child teaches an adult to pause and appreciate the moment.
"Hurry!" says a woman, glancing at her watch and leading a boy by the hand down the sidewalk. The child spies a Dachshund. On the next page, he says, "Wait." He bends down to let the dog smell his hand. "Hurry!" repeats the woman, as they walk past a blue truck with a fish pattern, and approach a construction site. "Wait" reads the text on the next double-page spread, as the boy waves to a worker who's filling in a pothole. The book's genius design, in alternating spreads, plays up the energy of the adult intent on reaching her destination--the exclamation point, the italicized text, the crowded double-page spreads--and that of the observant child pausing to take in his surroundings. Portis rewards readers who, like the boy hero, linger. The truck with the fish motif shows up a few pages later in front of a fish store. (A striped fish matches the boy's T-shirt.) As the adult urges the child to "Hurry!" past an ice cream truck, he points out a rainbow Popsicle stick ("Wait."), a foreshadowing of the book's climax.
Portis quickens the pace when rain arrives. "Hurry!" comes three times in a row. But the child tugs back ("Wait") to show his adult companion (who introduces the third word) a miracle of nature: "Yes. Wait." --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness