Today Is the Day

PreS-Gr 3–At daybreak, the sun peeks over the horizon, appearing like a dramatic line of electric current surging through the remnants of night’s darkness. A bird sings out, announcing the sun’s ascent, and people around the world awake to meet the new day. Wallace’s rhythmic story is told from the perspective of a self-aware day: “the Day now knows that it is a day of firsts and lasts, of missteps and misfortunes, of milestones, of miracles, and of everything in between.” Day is all things at once, mundane and momentous: a morning commute, birthday celebrations, laughter, funerals, storms, and airplane flights. Rex’s digitally rendered illustrations are colorful and lively, adeptly commanding the contrast between light and dark. Each spread is a kaleidoscope of overlapping moments demonstrating the diversity and commonality in the human experience around the world. The text appears handwritten and flows through the illustrations, reminiscent of a scrawled caption below a photograph; a font and format choice thereby adds the quality of human experience to the day. However, just as each day rises, each must wane; the illustrations darken and “at the end of a Day’s life, it breathes, ticktock, ticktock, ticktock, until it ticks its last second…and makes space for the next rise.” Back matter contains a collection of intriguing statistics that comprise such days, such as the average number of human heartbeats, laughs, earthquakes, and teeth lost around the world.