Review - Count on Me

Count on Me
by Miguel Tanco
Date: 2019
Publisher: Tundra Books (NY)
Reading level: C
Book type: picture book
Pages: 48
Format: e-book
Source: NetGalley

A young girl sees the world differently in this beautiful picture book celebration of math.

Everyone has a passion. For some, it's music. For others, it's art. For our heroine, it's math. When she looks around the world, she sees math in all the beautiful things: the concentric circles a stone makes in a lake, the curve of a slide, the geometric shapes in the playground. Others don't understand her passion, but she doesn't mind. There are infinite ways to see the world. And through math is one of them.

This book is a gorgeous ode to something vital but rarely celebrated. In the eyes of this little girl, math takes its place alongside painting, drawing and song as a way to ponder the beauty of the world.

(synopsis from Goodreads)

This is a story about a little girl whose passion is math. She's tried all sorts of other things--from cooking to music--but nothing excites her the way math does. She sees it in everything around her. The main message is that everybody sees the world in a different way, and being passionate about math is a good thing.

I do kind of wish the main narrative had emphasized more the relationship between math and all of the girl's experimental activities (dance, cooking, sports, music, etc.), rather than just having her dismiss them as not for her. In the back of the book, we see the girl's notebook in which she talks about things like fractals and trajectories. So while the reader can clearly see that math factors into all of those activities that she dismissed before, the girl herself doesn't always seem to acknowledge the links in the main narrative.

That bit with the notebook at the back is probably my favourite part of the book. It sort of turns this into a fiction/non-fiction hybrid. There's no real "story" otherwise, just a child talking about her unique worldview.

I would recommend this one, especially to kids who are passionate about math. I like the way it shows that math is something that's part of everything we do, and isn't really that strange of a passion to have.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tundra Books (NY) for providing a digital ARC.

Premise: 4/5
Meter: n/a
Writing: 3/5
Illustrations: 3/5
Originality: 4/5

Enjoyment: 4/5

Overall: 3.67 out of 5