Starred Review from Booklist!

Ideal for families with working parents—and that’s pretty much everyone now, right?—Levine’s cozy ode to counting down to the weekend should provide some solace to the lonely: “The hardest part of going to work is being apart from you. / Let’s count the days till we’re both at home with a special thing to do.” Levine smartly doesn’t put all of his eggs in the weekend basket, pausing to focus upon special moments of togetherness wherever they happen to fall: at breakfast, while getting on the bus, when the parents return at night, and during family time on the sofa. The diversity extends to geography; the town, seen in full on the title page, includes metropolitan, suburban, and rural areas, and families from each region share the spotlight. Hector’s grinning cartoon-style illustrations are delightful, based in reality but accented with unexpected color, such as the carnival stripes of a farmer’s distant field. But the book’s greatest accomplishment might be its crosssection of middle America: white, black, old, young, white-collar, blue-collar, straight, and gay (and—scandal!—the gay couple is pictured hanging out in the bedroom). It’s that rare book perceptive enough to recognize that the random moments are those we treasure most.

— Daniel Kraus