Description

---

Where is the center of the sea? Why do the waves never break there? A book containing unanswerable, fantastical questions, inviting us to be curious, while simultaneously embracing what we cannot know.

A New York Times Best Children's Book of 2022

A Marginalian (fka Brain Pickings) Favorite Book of 2022

A New York Times Bestseller!
A USBBY Outstanding International Book of 2023

A 2023 Bologna Ragazzi Award Amazing Bookshelf Selection

Selected for the Academy of American Poets 2022 Featured Fall Books List for Young Readers
Starred reviews in The Horn Book, Kirkus, SLJ, and PW!

This bilingual Spanish-English edition is the first illustrated selection of questions, 70 in all, from Pablo Neruda's original poem (320 questions) The Book of Questions. 

Holding the wonder and mystery of childhood and the experience and knowing that come with growing up, these questions are by turns lyrical, strange, surreal, spiritual, historical and political. They foreground the natural world, and their curiosity transcends all logic; and because they are paradoxes and riddles that embrace the limits of our ability to know, they engage with human freedom in the deepest way, removing the burden and constraint that somehow, we are meant to have answers to every question. 

Gorgeously, cosmically illustrated by Paloma Valdivia, here Neruda's questions, already visual in themselves, gain a double visuality that makes them even more palpable and resonant. So clearly rooted in Chilean landscapes as they are, the questions are revealed as a communion with nature and its mysteries.

About the Author

---

Sara learned Spanish in the streets of Sevilla with Antonio Marín Márquez, his bandmates, friends, and family. It was there that she got her first translation job at age 19, working for a local music zine. Her degrees are in Comparative Literature, Spanish, Bilingual Education, and Library Science. She has worked as a children’s librarian in NYC’s alternative elementary and high schools for over 21 years, reading aloud day in and day out, and teaches future librarians of all ages at Queens College’s Graduate School of Library and Information Studies.