Your way to school might be by yellow bus, bicycle or car, but around the world children are also getting to class by canoe, through tunnels, up ladders, by donkey, water buffalo or ox cart. In Rosemary McCarney's The Way to School, a collection of gorgeous, full-color photographs of schoolchildren from Myanmar, Ghana, Brazil, China, Canada and beyond, readers will see that the path to school can be "long and hard and even scary" depending on the lay of the land, the weather, even natural disasters.
The lively, conversational text asks young readers to consider what they would do to get to school. "What if there was a river in your way? Would you bravely wade across... paddle across... float across... or fly across?" Each river-crossing, from pants-rolled-up wading to flying through the air on a zipline cable, is illustrated by a crisp, colorful photo of children and accompanying adults doing just that, and each photo is labeled, subtly, in small italics, with the country shown. "Whether your way to school is long and lonely" (solo trudging in Tanzania), "short and friendly" (walking with friends in Haiti), "wide and wet" (floating on a raft in the Philippines), "narrow and dry," (walking down a path in Laos) "or rugged and cold and slippery and high" (hiking on ice in India), "what matters is that you get there. It's always worth the journey!"
Buoyant and beautiful, The Way to School is a deeply powerful illustration of the importance of education and the universal drive to learn. --Karin Snelson, children's editor, Shelf Awareness