Riding the subway, Milo feels like “a shook-up soda.” To distract himself from his nerves, he sketches the people near him—a whiskered man; a woman in a wedding dress; a white boy with clean, white sneakers; a group of break dancers—imagining what their lives might be like. He draws the man at home, eating alone. The bride marries a man, and they float away in a hot air balloon. The boy takes a horse-drawn carriage to his castle, where a gourmet chef offers him “crust-free sandwich squares.” The breakers are followed and glared at in an electronics store. Meeting the white boy’s eyes, Milo wonders what people imagine when they see his own face. Back on street level, he and his sister join a long line, and he’s surprised to see the white boy in line, too. Thinking that “maybe you can’t really know anyone just by looking at their face,” he imagines alternate stories for the people in his sketchbook: a family for the single man, a bride for the woman in a wedding dress. Finally, he and his sister are united with their incarcerated mom, and Milo gives her a picture he’s drawn of the three of them, eating ice cream on a front stoop. Cut-paper and collage illustrations alternate with two-page spreads of colorful, Crayon-drawn stories in Milo’s sketchbook in this thought-provoking story about a contemplative, imaginative Black boy. (Ages 6-9)

The team behind the Newbery Medal winner and Caldecott Honor book Last Stop on Market Street and the award-winning New York Times bestseller Carmela Full of Wishes once again delivers a poignant and timely picture book that's sure to become an instant classic.

Milo is on a long subway ride with his older sister. To pass the time, he studies the faces around him and makes pictures of their lives. There's the whiskered man with the crossword puzzle; Milo imagines him playing solitaire in a cluttered apartment full of pets. There's the wedding-dressed woman with a little dog peeking out of her handbag; Milo imagines her in a grand cathedral ceremony. And then there's the boy in the suit with the bright white sneakers; Milo imagines him arriving home to a castle with a drawbridge and a butler. But when the boy in the suit gets off on the same stop as Milo--walking the same path, going to the exact same place--Milo realizes that you can't really know anyone just by looking at them.