Grade: 2

There was a time when women in America had to wear bulky dresses that weighed as much as a dozen bricks! That was until Amelia Bloomer, a 19th-century feminist, invented “bloomers” — a fashion trend which ultimately freed women from their burdensome clothing. Author Shana Corey and illustrator Chesley McLaren have created a charming picture book which tells the story of this unconventional and fashion-forward designer.

This wordless book demonstrates that a simple scene is not always what it seems! It begins with a close-up image of a rooster’s comb. Each successive image provides a more distant perspective, revealing that each picture is a small part of a larger scene — farm children watching the rooster, aerial views of the children and farm, and so on. As the imaginary lens pulls farther and farther away, we see that the farm scene and children are actually a toy farm set being played with by a child, the child turns out to be in a photograph of a magazine being read by a boy on a cruise ship, the cruise ship is part of an advertisement on a bus . . . The reader’s attention is captured as the imaginary lens pulls out into space. The Earth grows smaller and smaller until it is a tiny white dot on a black page. Have students also read Re-Zoom (Penguin, 1995), a sequel by the same author that examines the process in reverse.