My Shadow, a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, became a picture book by Ted Rand (1990). Rand’s watercolors are filled with light by necessity because with light there are shadows! The illustrations show children from around the world experiencing the poem. One child plays on a tire swing attached to an enormous tree, and her shadow in the grass includes all three: child, swing, and tree. A huge shadow fills the wall of a child’s bedroom, cast by a table lamp, for the line, “And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.” What does it mean when Robert Lewis Stevenson writes “he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.”? Rand shows us a child and adult looking down at small shadows around their feet because the sun is directly overhead. This book is a great way to introduce young readers to a famous poem.
