The Day I Lost My Superpowers
The picture-book shelves are crammed these days with stories of kids who imagine that they are superheroes—check out Stan Kirby’s Captain Awesome to the Rescue (2013) or Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman’s Superhero Joe (2011), for instance. Escoffier takes a lower-energy approach, introducing a plain young girl whose superpowers are depicted on the page by Di Giacomo as the small-scale stuff that they are. First off, the girl practices her flying. (In other words, jumping off her bed and the playground slide.) Then she makes things vanish (a cupcake), turns invisible (hiding under the bed), and breathes underwater (in the bath via a snorkel). Escoffier’s prose is simple and unadorned, and well matched by the childlike squiggles and understated earth tones of Di Giacomo’s drawings. The book’s quiet quirkiness points toward its status as a French import, though the ending—the supergirl, injured, is fixed with a kiss by her equally super mom—is universal indeed. Preschool-Grade 1. --Daniel Kraus