9 Kilometers
by Claudio Aguilera; illus. by Gabriela Lyon; trans. from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel
Primary    Eerdmans    56 pp.
2/23    9780802856005    $18.99

Originally published in Chile, this picture book begins with a quick chart comparing meters to miles (nine kilometers equals 5.59 miles), then the main text begins. A child wearing boots, jeans, and a backpack starts a long early-morning trek: “It’s still dark when I leave home.” The first-person narration describes counting steps (fifteen thousand on this walk), butterflies, and lizards in order to pass the time. Most of the story is revealed in the atmospheric acrylic paintings; for example, we see the child use a forked stick to raise the bottom of a barbed-wire fence and crawl through. The illustrations vary the point of view, so sometimes we are watching the protagonist, and other times we have a bird’s-eye view that demonstrates how small the child is and what a long way there is to go. One particularly effective picture shows the character crossing a cow ­pasture, looking tiny in the expanse with the bigger animals. The ­matter-of-fact tone is echoed in the ­closing pages, which give information on the distances children in various parts of the world might travel to school—revealed at the end to be our narrator’s destination—using specific examples. Additional information about the birds seen in the pictures is appended. The protagonist’s path is shown on the endpapers, perhaps encouraging readers to compare their own routes to school.

From the March/April 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.