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Flights of Fancy

Flights of Fancy

‘The Day I Lost My Superpowers’ and ‘Flight School’

Mired in reality as adults are, they can find it hard to remember that children’s outsize desires are often best fulfilled imaginatively. Two entertaining new books make this point with a light touch. “The day I discovered I could fly, I knew that I was special,” begins Michaël Escoffier in “The Day I Lost My Superpowers,” illustrated by Kris Di Giacomo. The speaker is a preschooler (seemingly a girl, though boy readers will find there’s nothing to prevent them imagining themselves in her place) who is convinced — in a way quite rightly — of her own superpowers. These include the ability to launch herself off the playground slide into the sandbox, to make cupcakes disappear by sheer force of concentration, and to direct plants and inanimate objects to do her will by staying in one place.
Escoffier and Di Giacomo are an experienced comic team who previously worked together on the picture books “Brief Thief” and “Me First!” Di Giacomo’s drawings, in pencil, or possibly Conté crayon, are sketchy and full of movement. As the supergirl swings, jumps, laughs, belly flops and at one point, bawls, Di Giacomo captures something refreshing and authentically childlike about her unselfconscious emotions.
Photo
Credit From "Flight School"
Escoffier keeps faith with his fearless protagonist, never wavering from telling the story from her perspective. He relies on Di Giacomo’s visual narration to explain what’s really going on. (In the case of the disappearing cupcakes, traces of frosting on a certain person’s chubby cheeks give a clue to their ultimate destination; a boast about breathing underwater is accompanied by a picture of that same someone bottom-side-up in the bathtub, breathing through a snorkel.) Escoffier rounds up the story with a warmhearted, love-affirming twist that could make “The Day I Lost My Superpowers” a contender for best book for Mother’s Day; it turns out that superpowers run in the family.
Lita Judge’s “Flight School” tells an equally funny — and emotionally credible — story about the power of the imagination. A very determined little penguin announces he has “the soul of an eagle” and “was hatched to fly.” He enlists the help of some bigger birds in taking to the skies. Tricked out in goofy red aviator glasses, he tries and tries again and, of course, fails. Judge (of “Red Sled” and “Red Hat”) has a delicate touch with expressions, and her disappointed flight instructors look like music teachers whose favorite pupil abandons orchestra for ice hockey. But all is not lost: They think up a plan to help the penguin realize his dream. In the end, the flight he takes is a triumph of the imagination over experience. It makes him happy all the same.

THE DAY I LOST MY SUPERPOWERS

By Michaël Escoffier
Illustrated by Kris Di Giacomo
32 pp. Enchanted Lion Books. $16.95. (Picture book; ages 3 to 8)

FLIGHT SCHOOL

Written and illustrated by Lita Judge
40 pp. Atheneum. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 8)