Frank Morrison's (Jazzy Miz Mozetta) portrait of an irresistible heroine makes her enthusiasm infectious in this high-spirited authorial debut from his wife, Connie Schofield-Morrison.
The child's feet hardly touch the city streets as the narrator announces, "I thought of a rhythm in my mind." As she and her mother pass a teen tapping a beat on plastic drums, she says, "I heard the rhythm with my ears." The flutter of butterfly wings joins in: "I looked at the rhythm with my eyes." Everything around the girl affirms her rhythm, including the smells wafting from a cupcake vendor's cart and the sounds she creates by clapping her hands together with another child's in the park. The heroine fairly bursts with the beat she carries, and the children who surround her on the sidewalk and in the park reflect the many faces of the United States. As the two clapping partners erupt into foot tapping and finger snapping, readers see the spectators start to groove, too. "I shook a rhythm with my hips," says the narrator, as the children "shake shake" in a line dance against a realistic urban backdrop. She's swaying to the rhythm that's no longer only "in my mind" but gets passed down the line of children and soon gets caught by the adults. "I got the rhythm and you can too," says the narrator as she sashays down the street.
This husband-and-wife team celebrates the pleasures of a summer day, when everyone is outside and spontaneously unites. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness