osprey_archer | Picture Book Monday: Deer Dancer, The Good Brown Earth, and Snowmen at Night

I've been helping my mother mend picture books at the library on Monday afternoons. Each week, I think, "I should post about this book!" And then each week, by Wednesday, I've forgotten all about it.

Well, no more! Now I shall post about my favorite picture books on Monday.

This was prompted because today we mended an absolute bonanza of books, including one of Russell Hoban's Frances books, a series I adored as a child. Frances and her goofy little songs and her enormous picnic lunches (all stories are improved by lovingly described picnic lunches) - good times.

Of the new books (or rather new to me books; they generally don't get to mending till they're somewhat aged), today's highlight was Deer Dancer, a spare and lovely book with lush forest illustrations, about a young ballet dancer who likes to practice in the forest...and one day, dances with a deer. The illustrations do a wonderful job capturing motion, and the girl's practice outfit includes a pair of little stick antlers in her hair, which I loved.

I also very much enjoyed Kathy Henderson's And the Good Brown Earth, about a young boy (maybe three or four?) and his grandmother making a garden together. Joe and Gram's relationship is sweet (Gram's happy just to let the kid play around in the garden), and the book includes rich full-page illustrations of the garden in each season of the year. I wanted to spend more time looking at them, but of course there were other books to be taped and glued and generally loved back into health.

Like Snowmen at Night, which is about, well, snowmen getting up to escapades at night. They have snowball fights! They slide around ice ponds! They drink cold hot chocolate! Which is basically chocolate milk at that point, isn't it? I always feel bad for snowmen and their inability to enjoy hot drinks. But this is me talking; the book does not dwell on the existential angst of snow people forever deprived of proper hot chocolate. They're too busy sledding down hills instead.