SNOWBALL
By Nina Crews, Greenwillow (ages 3-5), $15
Author Nina Crews says she was inspired by the blizzards of 1996, but enjoying this book takes no historical memory, unless it’s of the last great snowball you can remember. The simple story moves across the bottom of each page in large white letters, beginning on Monday, when the weather report says “Snow.” How long a week can be for the little girl in the pictures, when the white stuff doesn’t arrive until Friday. Crews’ photo-collages are the most distinctive feature of the book. Photos of children and snowy scenes are cut out and superimposed on photographs of similar scenes. The effect is to make the children pop out, larger than life. Crews has replaced realistic perspective with emotional importance. We see the scenes as we might remember them, all excitement and no chill.
WHEN BEAR STOLE THE CHINOOK: A Siksika Tale
By Harriet Peck Taylor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (ages 6-9), $16
Once upon a time, winter was going on too long for the Siksika people. Where was the warm chinook wind? In the cave of a huge bear, who was using it as his personal warmup device. A neglected, poor lad, along with his animal companions, wins back the wind for his people. The tale is told trimly, without much elaboration, as if not to compete with the splendid illustrations that fill the pages. Harriet Peck Taylor’s batik technique gives a special white edging to the figures and many parts of the landscape. The bear, who might be cast as villain in some tellings of the tale, is both massive and soft, with lighter flecks brightening his brown fur. He’s only being a bear, not being bad. Taylor’s art reflects the values held by the culture she is drawing upon, and that’s to be praised.
HOME ON THE RANGE: Cowboy Poetry
Selected by Paul B. Janeczko, illustrations by Bernie Fuchs Dial (ages 10-14), $15.99
Once you’re past the first selection- “Home on the Range,” which you know by heart-you’ll discover just how broad a genre cowboy poetry is. There’s room here for a lament about an old farmer watching his stock being sold off, and the complaint of a young woman whose cowboy skills are dismissed as “luck” by a grizzled old hand. Some entries are quite serious, while others have fun with their targets. While the publisher tries to claim a potential readership “from eight to eighty,” Paul Janeczko’s gift in previous books has been in reaching the middle-school to high-school reader. Bernie Fuchs’ pencil-and-oil drawings-in a palette predominantly brown, mingled with the rosy tones of sunrises and sunsets-don’t bring detail forward so much as they set up a shadowy background for the poems. Cowboy poetry at its best hits with the power of good country and western music-tangy, specific and not afraid of emotion.
