Ages 4 to 8, Grades P to 3
A beautiful celebration of friendship, math, and art that honors different ways of seeing and being in the world.Oneboyloves numbers.Everywhere he lookshe sees things to count.His classmates don’t understand counting like he does.A new girl loves patterns.Could she bea friendforLeo?With sensitivity and nuance, this tender friendship story illuminates the beauty in our differences and celebrates our connections to one another.Debut author Monica Wesolowska’s text is masterfully conceived and constructed to reflect Leo’s love of numbers. Young readers can count the number of words per page and discover how they echo the Fibonacci Sequence, a mathematical series in which each number is the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on to infinity! Even the color scheme in Kenard Pak’s striking illustrations follows a mathematical progression, bringing an underlying order and tranquility to the story. The mesmerizing symmetry of this fascinating and compulsively playable game of addition can also be found in the natural world and is an intriguing metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things.
About the Author
Monica Wesolowska was inspired by a math-loving child to base the words of this story on a math pattern. Counting as she wrote, Monica followed the Fibonacci sequence into a story of friendship and learned how math connects us all. She is the author of the memoir Holding Silvan: A Brief Life, named a "Best Book of 2013" by The Boston Globe and Library Journal, and a "Lit Pick" by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Literary Mama, The Carolina Quarterly, and Best New American Voices. She's a graduate of Reed College and teaches Creative Writing at the University of California Extension. Monica lives with her family in Berkeley, California. You can learn more about her work at monicawesolowska.com.
Kenard Pak used colors and shapes based on the Fibonacci sequence to create a visual story of a budding friendship that opens with a simple, airy room and blossoms into a full, lush ladscape. He is the author and illustrator of Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn, which received a starred review in The Horn Book, and Goodbye Autumn, Hello Winter, winner of the 2018 SCBWI Golden Kite Award for Illustration. He is also the illustrator of Maud and Grand-Maud by Sara O'Leary, Ten Ways to Hear Snow by Cathy Camper, Have You Heard the Nesting Bird? by Rita Gray, The Dinner That Cooked Itself by J. C. Hsyu, and The Fog by Kyo Maclear, which was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, their young daughter, and three cats. You can learn more about his work at pandagun.com.
