Praise for What If One Day...

A New York Times Best Children’s Book of 2023! A Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of 2024! An Academy of American Poets' Featured Fall Book for Young Readers! A Bookstagang Best of 2023 Winner: Best Illustration!A New York Times Best Children’s Book of 2023! “Pondering hypothetical disappearances, Handy’s playful text and Corrin’s by turns quiet and ebullient pictures create a satisfying rhythm: Precious things (water, the setting sun) are taken from us, and then joyfully returned.”
New York Times Children's Books Editor

“‘What if one day,’ the book begins, breaking the question across a page turn, ‘all the birds flew away?’ The answers are sometimes poignant: ‘Skies would be plainer,’ goes the text, set against a breathtaking expanse of blue, interrupted only by a baseball in flight and a child’s arm. And sometimes they’re funny: ‘Worms could relax,’ our narrator suggests, alongside an illustration of a few chilled-out specimens living their best vermian lives. Just as we’re becoming accustomed to this strange, birdless world, a miracle occurs: ‘But there are BIRDS!’ a double-page spread proclaims. Birds noisily, joyfully sing and flit about. It feels as if they might fly right off the page. Handy’s playful text creates a satisfying rhythm—precious things are taken from us and then returned—and he introduces enough surprises to keep it fresh over the book’s 80 pages. Corrin’s pictures are wonderful, by turns ebullient and intimate.”
New York Times

A Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book of 2024! “With playful call and response, the author asks us to consider what would happen if various attributes of our daily lives were to disappear. Splashy illustrations, double-page spreads.”
Bank Street College of Education

“Engages in the sort of extravagant speculation that children love… An affectionate work that asks what might happen if commonplace things disappeared… every sequence in the book follows the pattern: First there’s a hypothetical, then outcomes both prosaic and fantastical, and lastly a friendly reminder that, in fact, there are birds and colors (and water and bugs and people). What if one day you read this book to some 3- to 8-year-olds? I think they’ll like it.”
Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Bruce Handy is an author, journalist, essayist, critic, humorist, and editor. His first book for young readers, The Happiness of a Dog with a Ball in Its Mouth, was named a Best Children’s Book of 2021 by the New York Times. Handy is also the author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult (Simon & Schuster). He has also worked as a writer-editor at Vanity Fair, Time, Esquire, and Spy and has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, New York, and the New Yorker, as well as other publications that don’t have New York in their titles, including The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. He currently lives in New York with his wife, the novelist Helen Schulman. Ashleigh Corrin is a graphic designer by day, illustrator by night, residing in Northern VA with her husband. Her picture book debut, Layla's Happiness, won the 2020 Ezra Jack Keats Award for illustration. Her talent comes from her late grandmother who has inspired Ashleigh to serve people's unique stories with creativity. With her illustrations, Ashleigh hopes to contribute to good laughs, nostalgia, vulnerability, transparency, and seeing the light in ourselves and others.

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