Caldecott Monday: The Big Snow

[osprey_archer]

The 1949 Caldecott winner is Berta and Elmer Hader's The Big Snow, which I liked very much! It starts when the geese go honking south for the winter, which prompts all the other animals to ponder their own winter preparations, and culminates - of course - in the falling of the Big Snow. Lots of beautiful, peaceful nature illustrations; soft watercolors for the color pages and gentle stippled pencil sketches for the black and white ones.

I really like books about the changing seasons. This seems to be a genre that exists mostly for small children, presumably because it would be a bit difficult to hang an entire novel on the minutia of seasonal change, and it's very peaceful and comforting.

I think it would be interesting to read books in this genre that don't follow the spring-summer-fall-winter pattern, though. Something that follows the seasons in Florida or somewhere like that. Is that something that exists?

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

It sounds very appealing! I can almost picture it from your descriptions. I have to ask, are you a children's librarian, because finding anyone who's not seriously discussing the amazing art form that is picture books is a rarity. Well, unless they're a children's publisher, or a public librarian with responsibility for children's activities/buying children's books. Everyone else just looks at you blankly if you recommend a picture book to them, or backs away in completely bafflement and dismay.

I am also fascinated by how different US & UK picture books seem to be - we overlap very seldom, at least US-UK, far less so than in older fiction. (Of course, with the Caldecott list, I assume part of the criteria is that it has to be a US work, as with the Newbery, which isn't true of the UK equivalents, the Kate Greenaway and Carnegie).

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I volunteer at a library to mend books, and lots of the books that come through are picture books because kids tend to love their books to death, bless their uncoordinated hearts. So it's been a good reintroduction to the world of picture books.

I was so intrigued by the idea of yet another list of books to read that I checked out the Kate Greenaway awards, but it does indeed look as if it would be hard to find a lot of those books in the US. I wonder why there isn't more overlap with picture books? Maybe with very small children, publishers like to make sure that the morals they're imbibing from literature are homegrown.

[thisbluespirit]

Ahh, that makes sense! I knew you must have had some reason to look at them more closely, because most people really don't, which I suppose isn't surprising. Even when I did my stint as a judge for the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway ages ago, when we started, the last year's brigade (you do two years, but usually about half of you are doing a different two years, so you get about six newbies & six old hands each time) assured us that while the Carnegie brought out strong feelings, it was the Kate Greenaway that led to tears and blood on the carpet... and we were all, yeah, ha, right. But it was true, and we told the six newbies the next year the same thing and no doubt on forever. The power of good picture books when you really get into them is quite something, because they're so immediate and evocative.

To be fair, I think a lot of the backlist for the Kate Greenaway are hard/impossible to find over here, too! The ones that are still available/childhood standards are people like Edward Ardizzone (both easy & hard to find because he was foremost a line illustrator, so is often not credited, or you can get a different version with no/other line drawing - actually one of the eternal problems in hunting down the illustrators), John Burningham, Helen Oxenbury, Jan Pienkowski, Raymond Briggs, Shirley Hughes (especially Dogger), the Ahlbergs (can you have life without the Ahlbergs? /sadness), Quentin Blake (aka the man who illustrated all the Roald Dahl), Anthony Browne etc. How the situation is with the modern people I don't know, but my impression a few years ago was that there wasn't much crossover, which does seem rather sad. (ETA: Maybe it's because where you can alter a few words to make a US/UK edition with text, you can't easily alter cultural details and assumptions that are part of a big two spread glorious illustration, I don't know.)

We did have some people like Dr Seuss, Arnold Lobel, Maurice Sendak, and now Mo Willems, though, so there is some transatlantic movement at least. :-)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I loved Dogger as a child. The big sister's heroism in giving up her big teddy bear to get her brother's toy dog back for him!

We also had the Ahlberg's Jolly Postman books - I particularly liked The Jolly Christmas Postman.

I'm not surprised that Mo Willems has made the jump across the pond; he's huuuugely popular here. Does he come in dreadful cheap editions that fall apart as soon as you breath on them in the UK, too? Every week we have at least one Mo Willems book to fix, and my mother has taken to reinforcing them pre-circulation so they don't come back almost instantly.

[thisbluespirit]

The editions were fine, as far as I recall! Perfect binding can be a problem with longer books, but not usually with a pic book - they usually get grubby, tatty, eaten or torn before the pages come loose.

Aww, I thought probably some of the above must be familiar. Dogger is much beloved in general, probably above all of the Greenaways, although I don't think I read it when small - I really don't remember reading picture books the first time around at all. I think I learned to read very quickly and was onto longer things before we went to the library regularly, so I only read ones we had at school or at home. The Jolly Postmen books are one of those that are just too nice to hack it in a library, because of all the bits. We used to always keep our copies in the storytelling cupboard for special usage.

[summercomfort]

Hi, I'm here to leave a facetious comment that one could argue that the Song of Ice and Fire series hinges on seasonal change. ;P

But also: kids books are amazing (and amazingly hard to do right!) I'm currently having the hardest time finding good ones for my babbu. And bilingual or translated ones are particularly abysmal, because sounds and rhyming matter so much in kids books. ("Goodnight Moon" is atrocious in Chinese, btw.) Something I've been noticing, though, is that the Chinese ones tend to have a lot more moralizing in them, in the "share things with friends!" "don't eat poisonous mushrooms!" "learn to trust your own observations!" sort of way. :)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I've been surprised how few current American picture books seem to have morals. When I was growing up I think it was much more common for books to have a moral (or maybe that was just the books my mother bought for me?), but things like "Don't Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus" really don't.

I have a bunch of picture book reviews under my picture book tag if you think that might help you find some. I've become alarmingly devoted to the Ladybug Girl series this year, probably because she is basically me if I were a four-year-old.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I remember "The Secret Garden" having a lot about season change, though I suppose that's still a book mostly aimed at children, if slightly older children. "Watership Down" maybe? I know that the opening and closing lines are about the seasons (they're the sort of evocative lines that stick in your memory), but I can't remember how much of the plot in-between them is actually about seasons.

It is a lovely relaxing theme! Though I agree with you that it would be interesting to see other types of seasons. There must be at least one book about the coming or going of the monsoon in India, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes! The Secret Gardens does have a lot about seasons. And I recently read Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, which also has a lot about seasons, although I think something must have been lost in translation - the book was written in Swedish and I read it in English and it felt sort of flat to me, which is something I feel about translations fairly often.

Surely there must be a book about the monsoon. I know there are picture books (although I can't think of a title off the top of my head) about the rainy season in the desert in the US Southwest: the brief sudden flowering is clearly an irresistible subject for illustrators.