Like a Giant

A child spends a day on a dreamy romp with an enormous friend in Marc Daniau and Yvan Duque's whimsical picture book odyssey, Like a Giant.

A bright-eyed and bulbous giant is guided by a signpost across a dark plain to a child's balcony. In the slanting light of dawn, the child, wearing a jaunty puffin hat, awaits the behemoth with familiarity, expecting "the giant will come to take me on an adventure." The partners strike out "with giant steps... leav[ing] the city behind" and traverse forest, desert, ocean and vale, meeting each sweeping landscape with equal enthusiasm. "Everything will amaze us," the child confides with conviction. "Everything will enchant us." As the day draws to a close, the giant returns the sleepy child home and the pair separate with a wave, ready to resume their escapades tomorrow.

Daniau's concise and confident language emphasizes feral similes and geological descriptors to detail the pair's explorations: "We will eat like wolves, dragons and pandas.... We will discover ruins, cliffs, fossils, jungles, corn fields and parks." Duque does a lot of the work of characterization by depicting the giant in morphing forms that befit each environment and the child in their cheery red cape and adorably offbeat hat. Duque illustrates wide horizontal spreads in a particularly lush palette of saturated blues and greens, while anthropomorphized objects, such as a mailbox or mountains, lend fanciful details. Subtle shifts in light chart the passing hours, expertly mirroring the endpapers to frame the day's imaginative journey.

Equally pleased with their adventure and each other, the pair thoroughly savor their time together until they "return home shivering with joy." --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf

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