This Raindrop Has a Billion Stories to Tell by Linda Ragsdale, illustrated by Srimalie Bassani (Flowerpot Press, 2020). As the title indicates, This Raindrop covers the maybes of a raindrop’s history. The text and illustrations capture just a part of this raindrop’s range, including the fur of a mammoth to the end of a paddle.
What stands out to me about this book is the wordplay in the text: internal rhymes, alliteration, and more. The wordplay is subtle enough to be enjoyed without being noticed. Listen to some of these phrases: “flipped off the tip,” “plopped on the top,” and “tossed from the locks.” And another example: clouds “stuffed with precipitation in anticipation…”
Other sentences have other enjoyable sounds in them: “…it ROARED in the crash of the first ocean wave” and “tippy-tapped” on rooftops. This sentence has something great: “Maybe this drip shifted sediment that sculpted spectacular canyons and caverns.” The illustrator also “draped” the words over the mountain tops, as the text described, among other things. The drip is a “master of mysteries”… and “magical molecules morph” throughout the text.
The wordplay is so fun, and the soft illustrations of pencil and paint nicely capture this story’s beauty. End matter discusses the water cycle, water conservation, and so forth in more detail, but that only complements the great text in this book.
