Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. 5-8)Ī home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature. Considering the author’s track record and influences, it may find a welcome from younger audiences too. Short on internal logic but long on creamy scenes of calf and tractor either gamboling energetically with a gaggle of McCloskey-like geese through neutral-toned fields or resting peacefully in the shade of a gnarled tree (apple, not cork), the episode will certainly draw nostalgic adults. After the big new yellow tractor, crowds of overalls-clad locals and a red fire engine all fail to pull her out, the little tractor (who had been left behind the barn to rust after the arrival of the new tractor) comes putt-puff-puttedy-chuff-ing down the hill to entice his terrified bovine buddy successfully back to dry ground. 3 & up)Ĭontinuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long ( The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud. The image of a happy dog treading water with a frog on his head says it all. The author provides the perfect amount of humor to keep things from getting too heavy, and Muth’s astounding watercolors lend incredible depth, guiding readers easily from emotion to emotion as well as from season to season. Just when readers may find themselves reaching for the tissues, a new friend shows up for the dog in this smart and subtle meditation on life, love and loss. Fall becomes a time for slowing down, and then in winter City Dog’s friend disappears, an event foreshadowed in fall by a gentle image of the frog’s “hand” resting on the sleeping dog. A picture book of this length could feel endless, but this glides along as the friends share country-frog and city-dog pastimes in spring and summer.
The book follows the friends through the seasons. In Willems’s latest, a departure from his urban sensibility as well as his first book as solely the author, a dog from the city explores new territory when he moves to the country and befriends a frog.
0 kommentar(er)
