A light-skinned boy travels by space ship (alongside fellow passenger aliens in a range of fascinating forms) to a distant planet for a holiday visit with his grandmother. Once he's arrived, the two explore the area and see ancient cave paintings. When he leaves, his grandmother gives him a farewell gift of colored pencils and paper that originally belonged to his great grandfather. The boy uses these on the trip back home to record the view out the ship's window. Clues in the illustrations show that the grandmother's planet is Earth, and that this story is set in the future, when colored pencils and paper are unfamiliar antiquities. The art theme and those supplies connect the distant past of the cave paintings with the more recent past (our present) of the colored pencils, and the future of the story's setting. (Ages 5-10)

A young space traveler discovers art painted millennia before by a human being—just like him.

Our hero travels all alone on a spaceship, through the universe, past galaxies, comets and planets to go visit his grandmother on Earth for the summer holidays. She takes him to visit an ancient cave, where he discovers handprints and drawings of unknown animals made by human beings, just like him. To top off his wonderful holiday she gives him mysterious objects which once belonged to his grandfather — paper and crayons. On the way home he draws what he saw on his travels — to the amazement of his fellow passengers.

Jairo Buitrago’s thought-provoking story reminds us of what remains as everything changes. Rafael Yockteng’s fabulous art, a tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, presents us a wonderful, diverse future in which space travel is common, though knowledge of the past is still a secret treasure to be discovered.

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.1
Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, when, why, and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.7
Use information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot.