Monday is One Day
*Starred Review* Ideal for families with working parents�and that�s pretty much everyone now, right?�Levine�s cozy ode to counting down to the weekend should provide some solace to the lonely: �The hardest part of going to work is being apart from you. / Let�s count the days till we�re both at home with a special thing to do.� Levine smartly doesn�t put all of his eggs in the weekend basket, pausing to focus upon special moments of togetherness wherever they happen to fall: at breakfast, while getting on the bus, when the parents return at night, and during family time on the sofa. The diversity extends to geography; the town, seen in full on the title page, includes metropolitan, suburban, and rural areas, and families from each region share the spotlight. Hector�s grinning cartoon-style illustrations are delightful, based in reality but accented with unexpected color, such as the carnival stripes of a farmer�s distant field. But the book�s greatest accomplishment might be its crosssection of middle America: white, black, old, young, white-collar, blue-collar, straight, and gay (and�scandal!�the gay couple is pictured hanging out in the bedroom). It�s that rare book perceptive enough to recognize that the random moments are those we treasure most. Preschool-Grade 1. --Daniel Kraus