Higher! Higher! [Hardcover]

Do you remember the excitement of being a kid on a swing set and screaming as loudly as you could to be sent higher? You were but a passenger on that crazy bus and the sky was the limit. For the little girl in this book, the sky is only the very beginning of her amazing journey upward.

Each push from her dad brings this little pig-tailed cutie to new dizzying heights. First she can see over the bushes, then over the rooftops. A few more pushes and she can see the tops of mountains, a passing airplane and how Earth appears from above. Just when you think she couldn't swing any higher, she meets a surprising new friend (no spoilers here!) before beginning her descent back to Dad.

This book is short on words, but not on emotion. The excitement is clearly evident on the little girl's face as she swings further into the sky. The first seven pages only reiterate the title "Higher! Higher!" and it's up to the reader to inject the enthusiasm. Given the illustrations of her swing progress, that's a pretty easy task.

I love that Leslie can take a everyday, mundane activity and bring to light the type of imaginative thinking that kids are capable of. The swing set might be restricted to her own backyard, but this little girl's imagination knows no bounds.

The author paragraph on the back of the dust jacket cracks me up: Leslie Patricelli lives in the mountain town of Ketchum, Idaho, with her musician husband, three inspiring children, one fat cat, one skinny cat, two fast rabbits, and a legion of well-trained sea monkeys. If that's a peep at Leslie Patricelli's sense of humor, sign me up for all her books. And I'm relieved to hear her sea-monkeys are well trained - that's the mark of a good author.

My daughter (age 4) loves books. Of our embarrassingly large collection of children's books, "Higher! Higher!" has bubbled to the top of the stack next to the bed. Like the other children's books that I'd consider great, "Higher! Higher!" doesn't rely on a complex story arc to tell its story. In fact, in this case, the author hardly relies on words at all to tell her story. It is precisely this lack of words--combined with whimsical (yet also sparse) artwork--that makes the book so compelling (dare I say "addictive"?) to kids. This book is a favorite because my daughter loves to linger on each page, discussing the possibilities that each picture holds. It is definitely not a book that just gets read to a child: there is ample room on each page for creativity to blossom, and we often spend more time reading this book than reading books with more pages. I am certain it will be the first book my daughter reads to herself (and let's be honest here: once she learned to recognize the words "higher" and "hi", she was reading the book to me).
It's a fun book, a silly book, a beautiful book, and I highly recommend it.

I bought this book because my daughter loves to swing high in the playground and I encourage her to do so. The story is about a little girl who wants to go higher than a giraffe, a building, and so forth. My daughter enjoys the book tremendously and even talks about it when we are at the playground...if a book has stimulated her mind, that's about all I can ask for.