In this simple, step-by-step instructional picture book, learn how you too can visit the moon on your bicycle! All you need is a very long garden hose, a very large slingshot, a borrowed spacesuit, and a bicycle . . . and plenty of imagination. With tongue firmly in cheek, Caldecott Medal winner Mordicai Gerstein outlines the steps needed in glorious comic book-style panels and a deadpan voice, leaving nothing out: the food you'll eat, how to deal with loneliness in space, how to water those sunflower seeds once they're planted―even how to deal with the media attention back home after a successful trip. An inspired work of whimsy, How to Bicycle to the Moon to Plant Sunflowers is a spacefaring adventure for daydreamers and a starter kit for the imagination. A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013 *Starred Review* In this unusual picture book, a boy shares his inventive plan for reaching the moon, planting sunflower seeds, and returning to a hero’s welcome back on Earth. What with “homework, soccer, violin, and all the other stuff” on his schedule, he has never made the trip. Still, he happily passes along the practical details of his plan. Preparations include collecting and connecting all your neighbors’ old garden hoses into one 238,900-mile length, building an enormous slingshot that will shoot one end of the hose to the moon (don’t forget the anchor), learning to bicycle along the taut hose, and requesting a small spacesuit from NASA, among other important details. Brightly illustrated in cartoon-style panels as well as the occasional double-page spread, the imaginative, first-person text will be riveting for process-minded kids. Because, really, who doesn’t want to make a giant slingshot using 2,000 interwoven inner tubes and a couple of birch trees on top of a hill, not to mention travel in space? Can’t quite visualize it? Not to worry. Fresh and often-amusing ink drawings, brightened with color washes, illustrate every moment of the adventure. Gerstein, a Caldecott-winning illustrator, offers a uniquely entertaining picture book that glows with the satisfaction of a boy who knows he could travel to the moon. Preschool-Grade 3. --Carolyn Phelan “A grand flight of fancy perfect for a new generation of dreamers and planners.” ― Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Gerstein, a Caldecott-winning illustrator, offers a uniquely entertaining picture book that glows with the satisfaction of a boy who knows he could travel to the moon.” ― Booklist, starred review “...genuine and infectious...” ― Publishers Weekly “Readers . . . are sure to enjoy the ride.” ― School Library Journal “There’s enough reference here to the actual challenges of space travel to justify a quirky side trip in a solar system science unit―not that flights of fancy require justification.” ― BCCB Mordicai Gerstein (1935-2019) is the author and illustrator of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers , winner of the Caldecott Medal, and has had many books named New York Times Best Illustrated Books of the Year. Gerstein was born in Los Angeles in 1935. He remembers being inspired as a child by images of fine art, which his mother cut out of Life magazine, and by children’s books from the library: “I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.” He attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and then got a job in an animated cartoon studio that sent him to New York, where he designed characters and thought up ideas for TV commercials. When a writer named Elizabeth Levy asked him to illustrate a humorous mystery story about two girls and a dog, his book career began, and soon he moved on to writing as well as illustrating. The author of more than forty books, Gerstein lived in Westhampton, Massachusetts.