If You Come to Earth by Sophie Blackall

Author:Sophie Blackall [Blackall, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

If you come to Earth, you can stay in my room.

P.S.

How many eyes do you have?

Are you small or big?

Do you have any pets?

When is your birthday?

Is it always dark where you are?

Are you going to visit us?

My friends and I want to know.

The idea for this book arrived on top of a Himalayan mountain in Bhutan. I was working with Save the Children and had climbed a zigzagging path to reach a tiny two-room school with ten students. We couldn’t understand a word each other said, but the children drew pictures for me and shared their lunch, and I showed them some books. I have made books about boars and babies and bears and lighthouses, but what I wanted in that moment was a book that would bring us together. A book about their home and mine. I wished for the same book when I was with children in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in India and Singapore, and in Brooklyn, New York. And so, I decided I would make such a book. But I was going to need lots of help.

I talked to children all over the world and spent time at the Brooklyn New School where I made 23 new friends who gave me lots of ideas about how to explain our world to someone from outer space. Those children, Ava, Alex, Ari, Athena, Bernadette, Callum, Carolina, Denbele, Earon, Finn, Goriola, Gus, Ida, Iris, Karen, Lucia, Markell, Mia, Moxie, Nile, Noon, Tehutiamenra, and Willa are the students in the classroom image in this book, along with their teacher, Ms. Greta. I am grateful to them for their thoughtful, hilarious ideas. I told them making a book takes a while. I didn’t expect it to take five years.

As the idea for the book took shape, I knew there needed to be one kid writing the letter. I’d met thousands of smart, endearing children—how could I possibly choose only one to be our narrator? Then I met Quinn. Quinn has lived in Nigeria and Indonesia and Nepal, but when we met, he and his family were living in Australia. Quinn’s brother, Elliott, was busy with a lizard, so I asked Quinn all the questions, ending with, “What kind of snack would you give a visitor from another planet?”

“Mashed potatoes,” he said without hesitation. “Because we don’t know if they have teeth.” And then he slid over 17 drawings he’d made on flash cards while we were talking, of different planets and their possible inhabitants. I had my kid.

There are nearly eight billion people on Earth. I could only fit a small number into this book. Some are my friends and neighbors; some are families I saw picnicking in Central Park. Some I met at a market in Yangon, on a bus in Beijing, on a boat in Sydney, in a cow stall on a dairy farm in Hobart, New York. Almost everyone in this book is based on a real person. Some of them, like a few in the pages about things grown-ups do, are people you might recognize.

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