Ukrainian illustrators Andriy Lesiv and Romana Romanyshyn pay homage to the beauty of math in Stars and Poppy Seeds, about a young girl who aspires to count all the stars in the sky.
"Flora loved to count more than anything else." She "counted all of the animals in the world"--even the sea cows, elephants and platypuses. Counting the stars, however, poses a dilemma: "there were so many stars in the night sky that not even all of the numbers she knew would be enough to count them." Disappointed that her "complicated formulae and equations" prove unfit for the task, Flora's mathematician mother urges her to stay optimistic, reminding her that "every task, even the most complicated, begins... with one step."
Lesiv and Romanyshyn cleverly show the ways in which numbers play a vital role in Flora's life: a portrait of her bunny, Pythagoras, is made out of 65 "tiny poppy seeds"; on walks, Flora counts leaves, dandelions and the "buttons on the coats of passers-by." The authors' distinctive art style mesmerizes; the muted, neutral-color illustrations are accented with a red that pops from the page. Each spread illustrates the text's ideas in an abstract yet identifiable arrangement, such as the Milky Way depicted inside the form of a young girl. Though Lesiv and Romanyshyn's art is filled with math concepts that may be foreign to the target age group (such as equations, puzzles and maps), associating them now with the joy of story time will start young readers on the road to a positive relationship with the oft-dreaded subject matter. --Jen Forbus, freelancer