A WINTER’S TALE
By Ian Wallace,
Groundwood (ages 4-7), $15.95
Abigail, her older brother and her parents are city dwellers who maintain strong ties to the outdoor world. All Abigail wants for her ninth birthday is to be taken along on her father and brother’s annual winter camping trip. Her mother doesn’t think winter camping is fun, so Mom says goodbye with a bag of freshly baked cornmeal muffins, and the others are off. The book will appeal strongly to younger siblings, especially little sisters, and Wallace’s text is specific in ways designed to win young readers who hunger for the details of such a trip. The trip is just as wonderful as Abigail dreamed, and she actually ends up playing a significant, and believable, part in rescuing a fawn trapped in fishing line. Wallace’s acrylic illustrations often pull back from the immediate scenes of the three campers, so that we can admire the natural world around them.
ARCTIC SON
By Jean Craighead George, paintings by Wendell Minor,
Hyperion (ages 6-9), $14.95
Jean George’s knowledge of the contemporary Inupiat people of Arctic Alaska is known to many through her earlier book “Julie of the Wolves” and its sequels. Writing here for a younger audi-ence, she tells the story of her own grandson, from his birth in a small northern village to the time he starts school. A family friend gives the baby an Inupiat name as well as his English one, and that weaves a thread through the passing seasons in the narrative. Wendell Minor’s watercolors com-bine an almost tactile precision of detail with a luminosity of back-ground. Readers should be prepared for the drawing of a bowhead whale pulled on the ice after being harpooned. The red blood is vivid against the ice. George makes a careful case for the ecologically appropriate use of the bowhead by the villagers; older children will understand, but younger ones may need helpful talking about it.
MUSICIANS OF THE SUN
By Gerald McDermott,
Simon & Schuster (ages 5-8), $17
Retelling an Aztec myth, McDermott’s intensely hued pages show how music and color came to the Earth. McDermott’s language is majestic, aptly so for a struggle between the “Lord of the Night, King of the Gods, Soul of the World” and the Sun. Initially, the Earth is gray and without song or dance because the Sun holds captive the musicians Blue, Red, Green and Yellow. Night summons Wind, and gives him special weaponry for an effort to free the musicians. Children can identify with the small and reluctant Wind, who will need the help of other Earth spirits as well. McDermott’s well-chosen words are almost overshadowed by the magnificent colors of the illustrations, which move from the black, gray and blue world of the Earth to the orange, red and yellow world of the Sun. McDermott knows the visual arts of the myth’s culture, and there are Aztec echoes in headdresses, armor and body postures. The final illustration, of a world so changed by color and light that even Sun is happy, affirms the myth itself.
