When Milo attempts to get his sister’s attention to show her his drawings, she and Milo appear on the left page, with a rear view of the suit-wearing boy to the far left, but on the right page, Robinson splits the top and bottom of the page with a white line, showing Milo above and the boy below, both positioned just right of center. The exception to this page layout signals an important turning point in the story. The scenes Milo invents for the lives of the train riders appear in double-page, landscape spreads (with the spiral middle showing in the gutter), alternating with Robinson’s double-page spreads of Milo’s actual journey. In Milo’s imaginative conjecture, this boy goes home to a castle, where his sizable staff eagerly awaits his arrival, lowering the drawbridge for him and bringing him crust-free sandwiches. Milo’s primary curiosity, however, focuses on a White boy with bright white Nikes, wearing a suit jacket and tie he enters with a man Milo speculates is his father. As the diverse riders enter the train, Milo draws them in his spiral sketchbook, creating a life for them that involves both his imagination and many assumptions - some positive, some less so.įor the man sitting next to him, reading the newspaper and completing the crossword, Milo initially imagines him returning home through brown sludge to his cluttered sixth-floor apartment, three escaped parakeets, three cats, “burrowing rats,” and a lonely dinner of “tepid soup.” Milo also predicts a heterosexual wedding for a blue-haired, dark-skinned woman, who carries a flower bouquet and a small tan dog with a lolling tongue in a shoulder bag. The narrator describes himself as “a shook-up soda” early in the story, when readers cannot discern whether this refers to the physical turbulence of riding the subway or the emotional upheaval related to their destination. Wearing distinctive big round eyeglasses and a bright green winter hat, Milo and his unnamed teenaged big sister take the New York subway to a destination - we read that they do this monthly - that remains a mystery until nearly the end of the story. When you look at others, what do you assume? When others look at you, what do they see? These questions lie at the heart of Milo Imagine the World, written by Matt de la Peña. Christian Robinson has illustrated this book in two styles: his artwork stands apart stylistically and spatially from the drawings of Milo, the story’s young African American artist and protagonist.
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