Between You and Me
by Rob Sanders; illus. by Raissa Figueroa
Primary    Clarion/HarperCollins    32 pp.
12/24    9780063239593    $19.99

A Black child looks out the window as a white child moves in next door. Sanders’s lyrical text celebrates the in-between of opposing ideas: “Between yesterday and tomorrow…Today.” “Between strangers and friends…‘Hello.’” “Between an idea and ta-da…Tinkering and trying.” And so on, until the conclusion: “Between you and me? Not one thing. And everything.” Between the tidy, hopeful daylit bedroom on the front endpapers and the messy, joy-filled moonlit bedroom on the back endpapers, a friendship evolves through shared moments, big and small, “ordinary and magical.” Figueroa’s fanciful digital art expands on Sanders’s imaginative text. The newcomer sports a froggy hat throughout. The welcoming child expectantly carries a toy sailboat to their first encounter. Much of the duo’s creative play involves repurposed moving boxes, and paper cups serve as communication devices on one page and glowing lanterns on the next. Highly saturated colors dominate, but Figueroa also dramatically manipulates color to emphasize the power of liminal spaces. On a page that reads, “Between a sunny day and ‘Run! Run! Run!’…Thunder. Lightning. Rain,” for example, the friends fly in cardboard-box airplanes through a safe, pale-pink break in dark, swirling, orange-red storm clouds. Between Sanders’s words and Figueroa’s images—a reminder that there are wonders to observe in the gaps between one moment and the next.

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.