Plenty of picture books encourage young readers to go outside and have an adventure, but Thao Lam's wordless and wondrous One Giant Leap raises the bar by presenting an out-of-doors setting that's also out of this world--at least in the mind of one imaginative child.
The book begins with a kid suiting up to go out in the cold: snowsuit, boots, gloves, hat. With a tweak of the child's imagination, the ensemble becomes a space suit. Once outside, the kid weightlessly bounces across an uninhabited planet (that may really be a deserted city); plants a flag after climbing a space mountain (that may really be some sort of urban edifice); and faces three muscle-bound aliens (who may really be children in bulky snowsuits). Finally, the child, seeking a space ride home, reaches a door and enters... a classroom (that's really a classroom). It's occupied by three kids, whose "alien" apparel (snowsuits) can be spotted on wall hooks.
Lam's cut-paper collage art is reproduced so vividly that readers may half expect to be able to move the images around like tangram pieces. As in all wordless picture books, the art is doing double duty, pleasing the eye and telling the story, but Lam (Happy Birthday to Me) also executes the occasional visual trick. In one showstopper, readers see what the space-suited child sees--six blocky shapes lined up on the ground--until a facing panel from a different perspective makes clear that the shapes are actually the three not-really-aliens' space-booted feet. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author