Head Full of Clouds

Starred review from February 15, 2025
Dreams have the power to take you places you've never been before. A pale-skinned child wakes up one morning with "a little leftover piece of a dream floating around." As the day begins, the protagonist's senses are heightened, and the youngster notices little details of everyday life. Ripples in the puddles from the previous night's storm become oceans teeming with life. The taste of an apple is so delicious that the child writes a poem in its honor. A vast network of sidewalk cracks contain "roots winding down, down into the earth below," and "a fiddler plays a tune" whose "music is carried along on the breeze." The embrace of a trusted friend completes the child's day, making the youngster feel one with the surroundings and a part of a greater whole. Schwartz's lyrical text effectively uses second-person narration to place readers firmly in the driver's seat, empowering them to notice quotidian details. Sanei's digitally finished, acrylic gouache and colored pencil illustrations beautifully capture the feeling of trying to recall fragments of one's dreams as they swiftly vanish from memory. As the story progresses, the art becomes less and less surreal, but the emotions behind these nighttime visions remain. Together, they portray a setting where one's presence is small but mighty: "You're one little bit in this great, wide world." A grounded yet dreamy look at how we occupy our place in this vast world.(Picture book. 5-8)

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March 1, 2025
A contemplative, inviting second-person text and playfully surreal illustrations capture the nature of dreams and the magic of the real world. One morning a child wakes up with "a little leftover piece of a dream floating around" her head but can't remember the details. The opening illustration reflects this in-between feeling: the bedroom floor is liquid, and the ceiling is alive with fish, ocean plants, and a waxing crescent moon. The girl walks around town, senses heightened, but still her "head is in the clouds." She takes note of her surroundings: an apple "tastes so good [she] write[s] a poem to it"; she "can almost see" a street musician's tune "drifting down the street." Sanei's mesmerizing illustrations -- acrylic gouache and colored pencil, finished digitally -- beautifully enhance Schwartz's unhurried, image-rich narrative with surprising perspectives (e.g., looking up at the protagonist from the bottom of a puddle's ocean-y depths), a lush color palette, and imaginative interpretation of the text. Repeating visual motifs (fish, the moon, rabbits) help tie the curious reflections together. When the girl finally remembers "a piece of [her] dream," the double-page spread returns to her bedroom. She's a small figure in the upper left listening to fish tell secrets and looking out at stars falling from a moonlit night sky that turn into sea stars in the "deep, and dark, and wild, and beautiful" ocean barely contained by her bedroom walls. A hug from a friend helps ground our dreamer, who carries her imaginative reflections with her. This is a fantastic journey to savor and revisit. Kitty Flynn

(Copyright 2025 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

Starred review from March 1, 2025
Preschool-Grade 2 *Starred Review* A child wakes up in the morning with a "little leftover piece of a dream floating around." Trying hard to remember her reverie, she feels foggy and disoriented. When she goes outside, she marvels at the magnificence of things she ordinarily overlooks, like shimmering waves rolling in rain puddles, sparrows hiding in bushes, and dandelions sprouting through gray concrete. Her senses heightened, a bite of an apple inspires poetry and musical notes from a violin player dance in the air. There are many surreal surprises in Sanei's expansive gouache-and-colored-pencil illustrations, from recurring remnants of the child's oceanic dream to a topsy-turvy cartwheel scene with slow-motion movements suspended in transparent air bubbles. The poetic text has a stream-of-consciousness quality, made all the more immersive by the second-person point of view narration: "Sometimes you feel so big, and sometimes you feel so small. You're one little bit in this great, wide world." Like an epiphany, the child's dream comes back to her. When she meets a friend in the park, she is fully attuned to the present: "Now the day feels as solid as the trunk of a tree, as wide as the sunny sky." This unique dream of a picture book is grounded in solid storytelling and encourages close inspection, contemplation, and appreciation.

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