Dream Blocks

There is a particular quality of light in childhood, a golden hour that lingers in memory long after it has faded. Dream Blocks captures this ephemeral glow with verses that understand children are not simple creatures but full human beings, capable of profound feeling and fancy. Aileen Cleveland Higgins writes with a tenderness that never condescends, letting a child mourn a dying rose with genuine grief, wonder at the slow click of a big clock, or pray with the earnest gravity only the young can muster. These are poems that remember what it felt like to be small in a large world, to find magic in a rainy afternoon and mystery in moonlit paths. Illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith, whose softened lines and gentle colors almost disappear into the page, the book becomes a collaborative dream. The verses range from the whimsical to the quietly moral, from the educational to the purely lyrical. But they share a common gift: they take children's inner lives seriously. This is a book to read aloud at bedtime, to leave on a nightstand, to grow up with and return to. For anyone who remembers building castles in the air, or wishes they still could.