Picture Book Monday with a review of At the same moment around the world

I was seven years old when I took my first really long trip in a plane. We flew from Cyprus to India, and when we arrived in Delhi it was early morning. My body felt as if it was the middle of the night, and yet the sun was coming up, turning the sky a golden red color. It seemed so strange that my friends in Cyprus were in their beds fast asleep, while the people around me were drinking their morning tea and thinking about the day ahead

In today's picture book readers will get the opportunity to travel around the world to see what a colorful collection of people in different countries are doing at exactly the same moment in time. The book is fascinating to read and the illustrations are a joy to explore.

At the same moment around the world

Clotilde Perrin

Picture Book

For ages 5 to 7

Chronicle Books, 2014, 978-1-4521-2208-3

It is six o’clock in the morning in Dakar, in the country of Senegal, and the sun is just starting to rise in the east. As the yacht All Around the World steams along the coastline, Keita and his father are on the beach, counting the fish that were caught in the nets that night.  

   At the same time, in Paris many thousands of miles away, it is seven o’clock and people are starting to move around the streets. In an apartment, Benedict is drinking hot chocolate before he heads to school.

   Far to the west in Hanoi, at the same time that Benedict is drinking his hot chocolate, it is one o’clock in the afternoon. The streets are full of people riding bikes and scooters and celebrating the Lunar New Year. A dragon kite flaps in the sky, and a dragon puppet leaps above the road carried by joyful children. Though so much is going on and it is noisy, Khanh happily naps in his hammock.

   Even further west, and across the Pacific Ocean, it is one o’clock in the morning in Lima, Peru. Rain is falling and stormy clouds scud across the sky. In one household nobody cares about the weather or the time because baby Diego has come into the world.

   In this remarkable book we journey around the world, seeing what is happening in the lives of people living is many countries at the same moment in time. The author completes our journey around the globe by bringing us back to where we started.

   At the back of the book the author provides readers with additional information about time zones, and there is also a map to look at that shows readers where the twenty-four countries mentioned in the book are located.