Lift by Dan Santat, Minh Lê
on May 5, 2020
ISBN: 1368036929
Genres: Adventure
Format: Picture Book Fiction
Goodreads

The illustrations by Dan Santat in this picture book are so spectacular it would be easy to overlook how perceptive and nice the story by Minh Le is. Iris is a young child who lives to press the elevator button in her family’s apartment building; it’s her job and she takes it very seriously. One day her world comes crashing down when her parents let her toddler sibling press the button before Iris can. (They seem nice enough but, wow, was it ever an act of horrible betrayal.) When it happens a second time Iris loses it and presses so many buttons the elevator breaks which has a silver lining because she retrieves the button from the trash and tapes it to her wall and then she gets to go to a space station. This book is excellent in how it describes Iris’s pain and reaction and ultimate redemption.  And it is one of those rare reads in which both kids and parents most likely will identify with the character’s mistakes and then reflect with compassion on both the people in the book and themselves.

Reviewed by Sarah Maciejewski, Patten Free Library, Bath