Quiet by Tomie dePaola

Two children, out walking with their grandfather, observe how nature is both busy and quiet. In the first half of the book, they see birds flying, a frog jumping, a dog chasing a ball, and more activity surrounding them. When the three sit together on a bench, they observe the birds resting, the frog sitting, the dog sleeping. "To be quiet and still," the book concludes, "is a special thing."

Appropriately, for a book focused on being contemplative and mindful, the vocabulary here is simple, containing lots of sight words. Longer words like 'dragonfly' are ones that should be easy for inexperienced readers to take apart and sound out. Each page contains one or two sentences, and most of those sentences are short. Even the longer ones top out at only eleven or twelve words. And the structure of the book itself means that many words will be repeated, as each creature or natural element is observed first in motion, then at rest. The text is neither as large nor as bold as it would be in a traditional reader, but it's clear and legible. The font is a thin sans-serif, and always appears against the white space that is the sky in dePaola’s distinctive illustrations. Those illustrations support the text well, for the most part, though there are a few words that may take a little more work – for instance, it's hard to represent 'blinking' in a single still image.

In a book as, well, quiet as Quiet, it's hard to typify a 'page-turning dynamic,' but when children recognize the book's repeating structure, they may be interested to see what each of the things from the first half of the book are doing in the second. After all, not every book has to be full of dizzying plot twists. Sometimes, it's enough to just be Quiet.