Desert Song, written in spare, lyrical prose by Laekan Zea Kemp and illustrated by Beatriz Gutiérrez Hernández, celebrates interconnectedness. As a multigenerational family gathers at sundown to make music, the landscape surrounding their desert home shares the stage. A menagerie of lively creatures is drawn to the family’s song, and, as night deepens, earth and sky — and past and present — harmonize.

Color is a star player in Desert Song. The opening endpapers glow with the warmth of a sunrise over mesa and foothill. Throughout the story, distinct palettes mark subtle transitions from day to night. And on every page, color calls our attention to marvelous details: here, the textures of pan dulce on a table; there, the instruments played by each family member. Most notably, Hernández renders desert life of great variety and abundance. From owls to barn swallows, scorpions to horned toads, and prickly pear cacti to ironwood trees, each plant and animal is depicted in a simplified, cohesive style, yet with enough accuracy to be admired in its specificity. A playful approach to scale and color creates just enough hide-and-seek interest — Is that a leaf? No, it’s an upside-down bat! — to delight young readers’ eyes.

But make no mistake, this small book distills a powerful and urgent message about spiritual resilience: “‘That’s why we play,’ my father says, ‘with your great-great-grandmother’s vihuela and my godmother’s ocarina. To remind us that they’re still alive between the notes. That when we sing to them, they’re listening.’” High up in the night sky, we see ancestors join the family’s music with their own instruments.

What most distinguishes the book’s illustrations, then, are their success in conveying a weighty, transcendent theme through graceful, loving, and deceptively simple means. As the young narrator makes the connection between his family’s music and his ancestry, he looks up in wonder at the night sky. In a dazzling spread, we see the child as well as his view of the sky, the periphery still edged with the familiar nighttime landscape, and birds and insects backlit by the moon. Higher up, the stars form the backdrop for a delightful performance of the family’s leaping and tumbling ancestors who, delicately rendered in white pencil, are glowing rather than ghostly, transforming the nighttime into a space of deep comfort and connection.

Another example of Hernández’s ingenious shifts in composition and perspective accompanies text that reads “All of us looking up, searching for familiar shapes in the stars. All of us remembering something.” The family, huddled in a close ring of colorful togetherness, looks up at the sky (and us). In between, birds and insects, also searching and remembering, follow their own ancestral pathways. The illustration summons color, perspective, composition, and scale to draw several connections at once. I can well imagine a child reader committing this image to heart for safekeeping.

In the book’s final spread, the little family-filled home glows with warm tones against the dark landscape, and the moon peeks through clouds like a benevolent eye. As “rain on our tin roof sounds like applause,” readers — including Caldecott committee members — may well be inspired to join in.

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of Desert Song]