How to Bicycle to the Moon to Plant Sunflowers: A Simple but Brilliant Plan in 24 Easy Steps - Hardcover

Gerstein, Mordicai

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596435127 ISBN 13: 9781596435124

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press, 2013

Synopsis

In this simple, step-by-step instructional picture book, learn how you too can visit the moon on your bicycle! All you need is a very long garden hose, a very large slingshot, a borrowed spacesuit, and a bicycle . . . and plenty of imagination. With tongue firmly in cheek, Caldecott Medal winner Mordicai Gerstein outlines the steps needed in glorious comic book-style panels and a deadpan voice, leaving nothing out: the food you'll eat, how to deal with loneliness in space, how to water those sunflower seeds once they're planted―even how to deal with the media attention back home after a successful trip. An inspired work of whimsy, How to Bicycle to the Moon to Plant Sunflowers is a spacefaring adventure for daydreamers and a starter kit for the imagination.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013

About this title

About the Author

Mordicai Gerstein is the author and illustrator of some thirty books for children, including the 2004 Caldecott Medal winner, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. A four-time winner of the New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year Award, his books include fantasy, Biblical retellings, biography, folklore, and alphabets and other works for preschoolers. He lives in Westhampton, Massachusetts.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In this unusual picture book, a boy shares his inventive plan for reaching the moon, planting sunflower seeds, and returning to a hero’s welcome back on Earth. What with “homework, soccer, violin, and all the other stuff” on his schedule, he has never made the trip. Still, he happily passes along the practical details of his plan. Preparations include collecting and connecting all your neighbors’ old garden hoses into one 238,900-mile length, building an enormous slingshot that will shoot one end of the hose to the moon (don’t forget the anchor), learning to bicycle along the taut hose, and requesting a small spacesuit from NASA, among other important details. Brightly illustrated in cartoon-style panels as well as the occasional double-page spread, the imaginative, first-person text will be riveting for process-minded kids. Because, really, who doesn’t want to make a giant slingshot using 2,000 interwoven inner tubes and a couple of birch trees on top of a hill, not to mention travel in space? Can’t quite visualize it? Not to worry. Fresh and often-amusing ink drawings, brightened with color washes, illustrate every moment of the adventure. Gerstein, a Caldecott-winning illustrator, offers a uniquely entertaining picture book that glows with the satisfaction of a boy who knows he could travel to the moon. Preschool-Grade 3. --Carolyn Phelan

Edition details

• Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1596435127
• ISBN 13: 9781596435124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 40
• Illustrator: Gerstein Mordicai