"My mama had a dancing heart / and she shared that heart with me." So begins a picture book whose beauty is both in the words, stitched together like an heirloom quilt, and in the art, a magical collection of paintings that captures the love found in the best mother-daughter relationships. All the radiance of the seasons shines through as the daughter, now an adult, describes how she and her mother headed out to the shore in the summer with balloons and kites tied to their wrists. "And afterward we'd seashell-pile the windowsill / and drink cold lemonade." They'd leaf-dance in autumn and snow-dance in winter. In spring, "high-stepping and splashing," they'd "slip-swish" through the green grass and later read rain poems and drink sassafras tea. Colon, one of the most exciting new picture-book artists, uses a special technique incorporating colored pencil and watercolor washes in layers; he adds texture with scratching tools, which gives the pictures a distinctive look. That may be the technical explanation, but what viewers see is the stuff of dreams, gloriously colored, evocative pictures that somehow capture the elusive qualities of memory and love. Ilene Cooper--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.