11 August 2017 SOMEONE LIKE ME by Patricia MacLachlan and Chris Sheban, ill., Neal Porter/Roaring Brook, July 2017, 32p., ISBN: 978-1-62672-334-4

“If you were a little girl...who tried to teach her dog to talk by moving his lips like hers and her chicken’s beak, too, and loved climbing the cottonwood tree, watching the sky that flew above her, and who ran away once with a little boy who told her he’d find her a white horse, and didn’t...Then maybe you would grow up to be someone who carries small bags of sweet prairie earth, someone who writes about how the sky looks through the branches of trees…”

Newbery Medalist Patricia MacLachlan’s SOMEONE LIKE ME is a delightful, semi-autobiographical picture book tale about an Everygirl character who reads, listens, and observes. In the long run, she is inspired to become a writer.

There is a soft, dreamlike, distant-past quality to Chris Sheban’s watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite illustrations. Many of them vividly conjure up life in the first half of the twentieth century. For instance, there is a wonderfully fun spread showing a horse and a dozen cows (who’ve broken through a fence) walking into town. The architecture in the spread recalls the sort of old, Main Streets that have long since been renovated.

Another favorite is a single-page pitch-perfect illustration of the girl reading. She’s on her stomach, her legs crossed at the ankle, atop a wooden-seated swing that is hanging from a tree.

I love the varied visual perspectives presented: the girl and dog hiding beneath the dinner table listening to the adults talking; the girl up in the cottonwood tree looking as if she could be piloting a schooner as the clouds drift by; the girl’s great grandmother out in tall grass, sending geese flying away, right out of the book, into our faces.

Here in California, we have an annual California Young Reader Medal program, in which slates of the previous year’s books are nominated, and students across the state read and vote for their favorite. SOMEONE LIKE ME is an exceptional and beautiful picture book that will inspire the next generation’s writers. I encourage my school librarian friends to read and nominate this one in the CYRM Primary (K-3) category.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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