If You Go Walking

3.7

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Author(s)

Erin Alladin

Co-Authors / Illustrators

Miki Sato

Publisher

Pajama Press

Genre(s)

Age Range

Release Date

November 25, 2025

ISBN

978-1772783513

Buy This Book

If you go walking, / You might collect berries, / Or pebbles, / Or wildflowers. / I collect questions.

Time spent in the outdoors during Fall and Winter stirs a child’s curiosity. In If You Go Walking, a thoughtful thread of questions (How do seeds know not to grow until spring?) invites young readers to explore the world around them with wonder. In nature, questions are everywhere, and answers can be too, if you know the right places to look.

Author Erin Alladin invites young readers to think deeply in this lyrical nonfiction text, celebrating children’s curiosity about the world around them. Illustrator Miki Sato’s textural collage art recreates the wonder of the outdoors in paper, felt, and embroidery silk, creating masterpieces that invite readers to look again and again.

Editor review

1 review

How to Answer Your Own Questions

January 03, 2026 (Updated: June 03, 2026)

Overall rating

3.7

Writing Style

4.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

4.0

Learning Value

3.0

A little boy and his dog are going walking, but instead of collecting pebbles or wildflowers, they are collecting questions. As they traverse different areas of wilderness, different questions arise. Sometimes, it's easy to find answers by looking around, and the book provides some of these. How do mushrooms show up so suddenly? Most of the mushroom is already spread out under the ground! But there are many other questions that the boy collects on his journey. He wonders about why leaves turn color and how birds stay warm in the winter, and has a lot of questions about snow. While the answers can sometimes be found through observation, sometimes he must take his questions home to investigate the answers. An author's note at the end gives some tips for research as well as the author's reasoning behind not providing all of the answers to the questions on the pages, making this somewhat different from other nonfiction books.

Good Points

The collage illustration style is especially effective, and I loved how fabric was used for clothing and real feathers make the birds look delightfully fluffy! The trees and natural elements are rendered well in paper. The dog is particularly delighful, as he frolicks through the outdoors.

While I rather wanted the answers to some of the questions right in the book, I understand the author's purpose in wanting young readers to try to find the answers on their own. The tips about observing the environment carefully and trying to find one's own answers are so important, but it is a different way to structure a nonfiction book. This makes the book more suited to setting up the idea of outdoor exploration rather than looking up facts.

I'm a big fan of walking outside, so plan on sharing this with my grandson when he is old enough to walk and pick up sticks, along with Uzu's Peggy Goes For a Walk, Gigot's The World In Our Backyard, Storey Publishing's Backpack Explorer Walks series, and this author's Outside You Notice, illustrated by Andrea Blinick.