In Eugenia Yoh and Vivienne Chang’s What If We . . . a typical summer conundrum is presented: Max is bored. Little sister Mimi follows as Max bounces from location to location. The park, pool and zoo pass by before Max declares: “I think the problem is there could be something better out there. Because over here, there is nothing else to do.” His gaze lifts to the sky as his feet move relentlessly toward the next activity, which is, like the ones before, only fleetingly satisfying.
Frustrated longing stirs Max’s imagination, and the gorgeous gouache illustrations that follow manifest Max’s wild wishes: eating watermelon in a house made of fruits, riding on a koi fish, jumping on a trampoline of Jello. These illustrations evoke the creative restlessness of childhood, when the real world is a cul-de-sac and the imagination an open road. But Max, with his large blue glasses, tousled hair and big dreams, is missing something important in these visions: his little sister, Mimi.
Mimi has been right next to Max all along, swinging and swimming with open-faced glee. But as Max’s plans get wilder, Mimi begins to wonder: Why can’t Max include her? Why is she so invisible? The dynamic of two siblings who are at once each other’s closest companion and so ever-together as to be taken for granted is as relatable as experiencing a hot summer afternoon.
The spare prose and lush illustrations pull readers into the siblings’ story, while visual and lexical echoes are satisfying to see and read. By the book’s end, when Max and Mimi once again do everything there is to do in the house, Max’s eyes are trained on his little sister’s happy face—and he looks happy, too. Yoh and Chang met as undergraduates at Washington University in St. Louis, and previously wrote This Is Not My Home together. In their author photo for What if We, they face away from the camera and stare instead at a portrait of Max and Mimi, as if viewing them in an art museum, accompanied by dialogue bubbles: “What if we . . . ” “Wrote another book?” This reader hopes they will.