Riding on the subway, young Milo looks at the faces of fellow passengers while his big sister stays glued to her phone. Studying the interesting faces, he thinks about what the passengers might do in their lives when they get off the train. Given author Matt de la Peña’s choice text and Christian Robinson’s wonderful crayon-and-collage illustrations, readers, too, will feel the bump and jump of the subway as Milo begins his journey in Milo Imagines the World. “…As usual, Milo is a shook-up soda” on these Sunday trips.
Maybe the whiskered man concentrating on a crossword puzzle will go home to a messy apartment with only parakeets for company. Maybe the woman dressed in white carrying her dog will be whisked off in a hot air ballon by an awaiting groom. Maybe the carefully-dressed father and son will go home to a fancy house with a butler and maids. Milo draws each of these scenes in his notebook, but his sister has no interest in looking at them.
When the carefully-dressed boy and Milo connect with their eyes, Milo’s spell of imagining is broken. Milo wonders what other people see in his face. Do they imagine what he does in school or hear his mom’s voice as she reads to him over the phone, or know how good his auntie’s stews are?
Time to get off the train onto the cold platform. And surprise: the carefully-dressed boy and his father get off too, and walk in the same direction into the same building. Maybe the boy’s life is not what Milo imagined after all. He thinks: “Maybe you can’t really know anyone just by looking at their face.” He begins to imagine different endings for the people whose faces he observed.
In a change of mood, his sister gives him a hug and takes his hand as they approach the metal detector. Readers will begin to glimpse the end of Milo’s journey: spotting his dear mom dressed in the orange jumpsuit of incarceration, giving her a long hug, and showing her his wishful drawing of their family of three sitting at home on their stoop with ice cream cones.
Peña and Robinson’s pitch-perfect picture book delivers an important message with grace and poignancy. There is no didacticism here, simply a thoughtful journey with a thoughtful boy, and one that ends as warmly as it ends unexpectedly.
Ages 3-8. G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2021.