If I was to ask you, what is your favorite book of all time?

Could you answer that?

It's kind of a mean question, isn't it?

It's also kind of an impossible question

for an enthusiastic reader to answer. I mean, just one book. But if you were to ask me,

Sarah, what is your number one all-time favorite picture book on the planet? I could answer you and in fact I'm going to.

My favorite things in the world are family, travel, and libraries, and chocolate, and

Bree and sourdough bread, but those aren't super relevant to our conversation.

I also love witnessing someone go after something that seems kind of out of reach

in order to make the world better for somebody else.

In fact, the very first picture book I wrote is called A Little More Beautiful,

and it's about an old woman who makes the world around her more beautiful,

and then the girl who grows up to take on that work for the old woman

when she can't do it anymore.

This little girl though, she knows it's not enough, right?

That there's something that only she can do and it's sort of her mission in the book to figure out

what that might be.

When that book came out, I described it as a nod to my own favorite picture book of all time.

Maybe by now, you know what it is because it too is about a little girl

who grows up to make the world more beautiful. That book also has family and

travel and libraries.

I'm talking, of course, about Miss Rumphes,

...