Authors and sisters Girmay and Fields give voice to a variety of beings, imagining love itself asking, ‘What do you know?’ and listening carefully to the response... In softly tinted art with the feel of sketchbook pages, … Fields draws as if setting down memories or dreams, with forms that repeat: people and birds with downcast gazes, bears with great claws, landscapes that undulate like ocean waves. Employing incantatory lines that conjure flame-like warmth and reverence, Girmay and Fields acknowledge the kind of knowing that’s older than books.
Publishers Weekly

“[In] this lyrical exploration of the world, … the musings are philosophical, ecological, poetic, and even sociological in nature… Many of these spreads let Mother Nature take the focus; humans (most are Black or brown skinned) are part of the land, not creatures who lord over it. Things even take a cosmological turn when readers hear from the Seven Sisters, who know ‘the language of light.’ Both text and art seem intentionally open-ended, leaving space for readers to extend meaning in their own ways, making it a fitting writing prompt for students (of all ages). Slightly muted, earth-toned illustrations feature flowing lines—from the multicolored furrows of a farmer’s plowed field to the rays of light in a starry night sky—that compel page turns. A contemplative, enigmatic exploration of life on planet Earth.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Author Aracelis Girmay and illustrator Ariana Fields, who are sisters, have created a sweeping, complex and mysterious vision of love in the picture book What Do You Know? Here, love is the protagonist who, in poetic and enigmatic text, wanders about asking questions of people, animals and even rocks... With soft lines and smudged colors, Ms. Fields’s pictures have a dreamlike quality...What Do You Know? is an indirect mechanism for delivering love to readers ages 5-8, but with its varied scenes and characters, it fosters a sense of the wondrous width of the world and the connections between seemingly disparate things in it.”
Wall Street Journal

All love is an outstretched hand of curiosity reaching for knowledge—a tender acknowledgement of a reality that is not yourself and a lively interest in its interiority… That is what poet Aracelis Girmay and her artist sister Ariana Fields explore in What Do You Know? … Page by page, love comes to the farmer and the seafarer, to the fruit bats and the honeybees, to the forest and the stars, asking each what they know, and their answers come simple and profound like a child’s question… What emerges is a glowing sense that love is not something we do but something we are, something the world is, something vaster than space and older than time.
The Marginalian