Leo & Lea

A beautiful celebration of friendship, math, and art that honors different ways of seeing and being in the world. One boy loves numbers. Everywhere he looks he sees things to count. His classmates don’t understand counting like he does. A new girl loves patterns. Could she be a friend for Leo? With sensitivity and nuance, this tender friendship story illuminates the beauty in our differences and celebrates our connections to one another. Debut author Monica Wesolowska’s text is masterfully conceived and constructed to reflect Leo’s love of numbers. Young readers can count the number of words per page and discover how they echo the Fibonacci Sequence, a mathematical series in which each number is the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on to infinity! Even the color scheme in Kenard Pak’s striking illustrations follows a mathematical progression, bringing an underlying order and tranquility to the story. The mesmerizing symmetry of this fascinating and compulsively playable game of addition can also be found in the natural world and is an intriguing metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things.