My New Favorite Snow Book

There's not much more to say about snow, is there?  It's white, it's wet, it's cold.  Kids sled, build snowmen, throw snowballs.  You know the drill.

But the difference lies in how it is said, and, more importantly here, how it is shown.


Into the Snow is a beautiful, playful book. Using colors that look like they come straight out of the Crayola box (one of the smaller sets, not the 64-crayon one!), with a texture that almost looks like rubbings (it turns out that the artist used oil pastels, gouache, acrylic colors and colored pencils), illustrator Masamitsu Saito perfectly captures a child's playfulness, fear, wonder, and exhaustion in a style all his own.  From the cover, on which our nameless child narrator mischievously pulls his hat down over his eyes, throughout the story as he works hard to pull his sled up the hill, and until he has had enough and goes back inside for the warm, cozy comfort of a cup of hot chocolate with mama, Saito renders each moment with warmth (or coldness, as the case may be!).

Author Yuki Kaneko's language is simple but vivid: "I've found an icicle.  It is shiny and clear like glass." and, at times, whimsical: "Oops, I snapped it.  I hope I didn't upset an ice fairy."

This book does the impossible: it makes playing in the snow fresh and new again.

A lovely book for toddlers and preschoolers - and their parents.

If You Don't Have It, Read About It! Snow Edition

Here in NYC, we're suffering (yes, suffering!) from weirdly mild weather and a scarcity of snow.  So, in its absence, we've been reading about snow.  A poor substitute for the real thing, but these two beautiful books go a little way in alleviating my snow cravings.

The Secret Life of a Snowflake: An Up-Close Look at the Art & Science of Snowflakes by Kenneth Libbrecht is my older daughter's favorite of the two.  I think she was taken in by the unbelievable gorgeous photographs, as was I - this is one of the few books I have bought without checking it out from the library first!  Dr. Libbrecht, a physics professor, photographs snowflakes with colored lights behind them, which lends them a breathtaking prismatic, rainbow effect.  With several books for adults on the same topic, Dr. Libbrecht, a professor of physics at CalTech, mostly succeeds in explaining and describing snowflakes to a younger audience.  I especially like the page where he shows the relative sizes of snowflakes compared to a penny.  And I never knew that snowflakes come in column (pencil) shapes, or that they are often not quite symmetrical.

The Story of Snow: The Science of Winter's Wonder by Mark Cassino with Jon Nelson, PhD. is my pick.  It also has beautiful, if slightly less dramatic, photos, as well as other diagrams, and the scientific explanations are a little more comprehensible to the layman (or, more importantly for our purposes, the laychild).  It focuses on the same set of facts as the Libbrecht books: how snowflakes form, the different types of snowflakes, including the column-shaped ones, and the fact that snow crystals are rarely perfect (or symmetrical), among other things.

Since both books cover essentially the same ground, I would advise owning only one.  Take them both out of the library and see which one you prefer.

I'm linking to Nonfiction Monday.

What is your favorite nonfiction book about snow?

Appropos of Snow

As far as I know, there are no books about the precipitation currently falling in New York, with good reason.  It is not picturesque, like snow.  You cannot play in it.  You can barely walk in it.  There may not even be a word for it.  Freezing rain does not adequately describe the icy, slushy mess on the ground this morning.  But there are plenty of books about snow.  Our line-up:

My kids and I can agree on the pleasures of The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.  It's a classic (and a Caldecott winner) for a reason.  Enough said. 

Another wonderful Caldecott winner is

Snowflake Bentley by Jackie Briggs Martin.  This biography of Wilson Bentley, who made the study and photography of snow his life's work, is fascinating, with beautiful woodcut illustrations and informative sidebars set against a background of blue with snowflakes falling.  My five-year-old was entranced; my three-year-old was a bit bored.  My only complaint - Bentley's experiments in photographing snowflakes are described but not explained.  The information that letting only a little bit of light reach the negative and leaving the shutter open for 90 seconds was his successful method doesn't mean a whole lot to non-photographer me - or my five-year-old.  I'm definitely going to look into books by the same author and the work of illustrator Mary Azarian.  This book also prompted me to add Snow Crystals, which contains reproductions of some of Bentley's photos, to my Amazon wish list via the handy but somewhat creepy Amazon features which show you other books you might be interested in based on what you have already browsed.

White Snow Bright Snow by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin is another Caldecott winner, albeit of older vintage (it was published in 1947).  It alternates a lovely poem about snow with the simple story of how various townspeople cope with and enjoy the storm.  The illustrations have that bright red-yellow-white-black color palette that just say "vintage" to me.  (There was a production reason for the limited color palette, right?)  I love the descriptions: the church steeple wears a "pointed cap" of snow; the fence posts wear "dunce caps" of it and the windows of houses peek out "from under great white eyebrows."  Again, my five-year-old appreciated it; my three-year-old liked the story part but didn't have much patience for the poem.  I'm going to seek out more work by this pair, too.

Another favorite of mine is the simply titled Snow by Manya Stojic.  This delightful book shows how different members of the animal kingdom sense and respond to snow.  As the geese prepare to fly south and the bear gets ready to sleep the winter away, Snow introduces the concepts of migration and hibernation, without using those explicit words.  After the snow falls it is a "sparkling blanket" covering the forest.  With its large print text and close-up illustrations, this book is ideal for younger children. 

My children's vote for favorite snow book, however, goes to Caralyn and Mark Buehner's Snowmen at Night.  A cute rhyming book, it follows the exploits of snowmen after their creators go to bed. 

Finally, after seeing it reviewed on another blog (unfortunately I don't remember which one), I've put a library hold on a book of poems about snow by Jane Yolen Snow, Snow: Winter Poems for Children and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. 

What snow gems am I missing?  And is there another topic that has produced as many Caldecott winners?