Waiting for Winter by Sebastian Meschenmoser

(5 and up)ĭUCK DUCK MOOSE by Dave Horowitz (Putnam) With imagination, humor and beauty, this book is a subtle wonder. This book captures a feeling of surprise that I have seen only in the faces of children who have moved from the south to the north and experience snow for the first time. The animals' Dada-esque imaginings of what winter will look like will have readers laughing out loud, and the anticipation of celebration builds until the last pages, when the snow finally begins to fall. No page is left unturned from the v-shaped formation of birds in migration on the front endpapers to the back endpapers with two humans wondering about an odd snowman, every piece of paper put to good use. Pages with text are interspersed with wordless stretches, as befitting both the setting and the story's arc.

The second strength of the book is the pacing. Granted, the soft lines make it visually a little hard to share with a group of children, but worth the effort, especially for city kids who will not experience so fine a representation another way. All of this is done with light, mostly brown and black graphite/pencil drawings, each line graceful as the falling of a last leaf. And even in the opening pages, where we see a raven lighting on a bough and the squirrel balanced precariously on the extended arm of a tree, the woods are so perfectly evoked. The double-page spread of the squirrel making rounds on a tree branch is such that you can practically hear the nails against the bark. The look of the bear is one we have seen on many a father who can't get some rest on his one day off. That said, Meschenmoser is funnier, sketchier, looser.

One is the art: quick sketches of animals that are so expressive and active, the work of someone who has observed the natural world very carefully, bringing to mind the attentiveness in the sketchbooks of the late Robert McCloskey (right).

There are two enormous strengths of this book. But none of them can anticipate the miracle of the real thing. What does snow look like? It's white and soft and wet and cold this, they know, from a passing deer. He's soon joined by a sleepy hedgehog, who joins him in sea shanties to stay awake, which rouses a lumbering bear who decides to also wait for the snow (and the peace and quiet it will imply). WAITING FOR WINTER by Sebastian Meschenmoser (Kane Miller) Squirrel determines not to hunker down in a hole in his tree this year but instead wait for the first snowfall, which he has never seen.

Waiting for Winter by Sebastian Meschenmoser