Earlier this fall, we took a careful look at Emma and Julia Love Ballet based on Julie Danielson's recommendation. Here's another title that Julie has high on her radar. (I hope all of you  illustration-lovers follow her blog Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Whenever I need in-depth information about illustrators, I try Seven Imp first. And when Jules speaks, I listen.)

Can One Balloon Make an Elephant Fly? by Dan Richards, illustrated by Jeff Newman, made an impression on me when I looked at it quickly several months back, but later when I picked it up to work on this post, I couldn't remember why.

Taking a closer look this time, I'm not in love with every decision the book creators have made, but there is one thing it does expertly: pacing.

The story starts on the endpapers, wordlessly advancing through a wordless spread to the title spread, which acts as the beginning of the conversation. "Mom?" asks a small boy (in speech balloons). "Can one balloon make an elephant fly?" Clever and concise. The boy (whose name is Evan) and his mother are at a zoo, and each has a big bunch of balloons. Why? No discernible reason except that the story wouldn't work without all those balloons.

The action hinges on a misunderstanding: the boy wonders whether a single balloon attached to an elephant could make it fly. The mother assumes he is talking about attaching a balloon to the small toy elephant we see perched on the bench between them. She is preoccupied at best, absorbed in looking at her phone. (In fact, in the first four illustrations in which she appears, she doesn't look up from the phone once.) As the book progresses, Evan attaches balloons to actual zoo animals, but she persists in attaching balloons to his toy animals, and never notices.

At the end of the book we see that all those real animals really can fly when attached to balloons, and the mother —although now fully engaged in the zoo activities and happily connecting with her son — is none the wiser.

Newman's cartoony art is drawn with confident charcoal lines and filled in with heavy darks and a few colors in a retro palette. The style bears some resemblance to early "Peanuts" comic strips by Charles Schulz, with the characters' large spherical heads and quickly drawn bodies. Any one spread seen on its own can be a puzzlement. Is that a zebra's tail or the top of a carrot? But in sequence, the story makes sense, and the animals, though quirkily drawn, are recognizable.

Overall, I think this is a fine addition to the shelves of subversive picture books — and of those that celebrate the power of imagination. I find myself underwhelmed by this book's chances at a Caldecott. But I would love to hear someone convince me otherwise.