Welcome to Your World

In a celebration of nature and the love that exists between parent and child, the story opens to show a baby swaddled and curled in its mother’s lap, peacefully sleeping as a warm summer breeze seems to lap at the mother and the surrounding trees’ blossoms. The soothing, rhythmic text feels like a lullaby wrapping a child in the warmth of a mother’s love (“Taste the juicy berries, smell the blossoms sweet./ Hear the gentle whisper of the waving fields of wheat.”), calling attention to the beauty of the earth in both broad sweeping strokes and delightful specifics. The illustrations showcase a series of parent-child pairings in their native habitats from different places around the world. Completing the baby and reader’s tour around the world, Prasadam-Halls and Kim bring the story full circle as readers are swept back to a final, yet somewhat familiar, tableau of the original mother and child pairing to discover that the child has grown to a toddler in a reminder that meeting one’s world is a journey, not a single moment.