PAUL, Alison

In just twenty words and a set of artfully plain pictures, Paul and Lehman reveal a sweet, multilayered story of family loss and closeness. May Swift lives with her father and (anthropomorphized) dog on a prairie farm sometime in the 1920s. May dreams of flying to Saturn, but the biplane in their farmyard sits abandoned, inhabited by chickens. When May finds an old photo album, she discovers that her mother was a barnstormer pilot and persuades her father that the plane, the Mighty Comet, should fly again. In the final illustration we see the family flying off into the night