Avocado Magic

PreS-Gr 3–The morning after her birthday, Ellie is dismayed that she hasn’t grown overnight. Her father offers her an avocado seed and the promise of magic to come with time, patience, and sunlight. Illustrations, with hues alternating between earthy and a green/yellow palette, underscore themes of growth and change and are replete with whimsical details to delight eagle-eyed readers! Ellie waits as her seed—and she—eventually grow. Her avocado tree, over time becoming fully grown, accompanies Ellie’s own transformation from child to woman to mother and brings the narrative to a gratifying close. The impatience of children, a well-documented feature of the demographic, gets a measured treatment here. There are layers of lessons about the passage of time to be found in text and illustration, as both the pages and Ellie’s life fly by.