Nice Work

A wise and tender story about the patience needed for a tree–and a friendship–to grow, from award-winning author Nicholas Day.

All he wanted was a peach tree: Because when you eat a ripe peach, you get sticky and sweet, and if you don’t wash up, you stay sticky and sweet. And you feel like summer.

But when the tree arrives in the spring, it isn’t a tree. It’s a stick. Nice work, the boy tells his parents. You bought a stick. Even his friend Maya agrees. It’s a stick.  

Though what happens when you plant a stick, and it grows leaves? What happens when your best friend moves away? What happens when everything that was once clear starts to change? 
Here is a story of growth, the enduring power of friendship, the persistence of rabbits—and a single, glorious, impossible peach.

NICHOLAS DAY is the author of The Mona Lisa Vanishes, winner of the Robert F. Sibert Award and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for nonfiction. He is also the author of the picture book Nothing, which received three starred reviews, and the adult narrative nonfiction title, Baby Meets World. He has written regularly for Slate; his work has also appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. He lives in Western Massachusetts with his family.

HALA TAHBOUB is a children’s book writer and illustrator. She started her creative journey as an architect and interior designer. She won the SCBWI Canada East chapter’s Storyteller Award for Illustration in 2019, and she was the SCBWI’s December Featured Illustrator in 2020. Hala believes in kindness, coffee, chocolate, and in the immense power of stories. She lives in Montreal.

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