In an overwhelmingly bustling city, a boy finds solace in a nearby overgrown lot.After wistfully looking out the window in the morning, the tan-skinned protagonist begins the day's routine: getting dressed, going to school, and coming home to a distracted parental figure. The child feels lonesome, lost amid the go-go-go life of the city. That evening, though, the little one visits an abandoned lot and communes with trees that remarkably resemble animals; the child's favorite is a series of trees fused together in the shape of an elephant. As time passes and the seasons change, the child bonds with his pachyderm pal and is shocked one day to learn that this natural respite is set for demolition for new development. After the protagonist desperately tries to move the trees alone, the arboreal menagerie comes alive and treks across the city in the pre-dawn light to find a safe natural space in an environment teeming with activity. Blackwood's wistful pencil and oil paint illustrations use a palette of blues and greens to infuse this quiet wordless tale with emotion about the all-too-common feelings of loneliness many experience in big cities.A contemplative look at finding your place in a busy world. (Picture book. 4-7)

Composer Gordon’s ungainly debut autobiography teeters unsteadily between illuminating and off-putting. Beginning with his birth on Long Island in 1956 and plodding forward to 2024, Gordon provides an exhaustive and often lurid look at the art and experiences that shaped him. Early sections focus on Gordon’s sexually tangled youth, during which he developed an incestuous attraction to his father (never acted upon) and, by 15, equated “older heterosexual men... having sex with me” with affection. A love of music, and opera in particular, grounded him. Admitted to Carnegie Mellon at age 16, he studied piano, composition, and acting. While discussing the intricacies of his own compositions, Gordon touches on how artists including Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim influenced him. After he graduates from Carnegie Mellon and makes a name for himself, the book dishes on these and other legendary figures, sharing uncomfortable anecdotes about “sitting with a... clearly jonesing Liza Minelli” and developing tense rivalries with playwright Tony Kushner and composer Adam Guettel. The effect is overstimulating and undernourishing, with affecting threads about addiction and AIDS-era New York crowded out before they can be fully developed. Gordon’s rationale—that other artists might benefit from knowing about his “messy, disgusting, glorious, shameful” evolution—fails to justify this undisciplined ramble. It’s a disappointment. (July)