My Winter City

Lyrical language and detailed watercolors capture a child’s first-person observations on a snowy city outing. Framed with the repeated phrase “my winter city,” the text mixes sharply observed sights, sounds, and feelings to evoke place specifics: “My winter city is a soup of salty slushes, full of sliding buses/ splashing, spraying, sploshing, soaking walkers on the sidewalk.” Clement’s paintings use twitchy lines and muted colors to bridge moments that Gladstone’s text elides—showing the child on the bus, for example, to illustrate “Water runs fast down the aisle past wet boots and toboggans”—and conveying the singular mix of bustle and stillness that city residents experience on snowy days. It’s a diverting excursion, down to the sled ride home: “My winter city is an afternoon journey/... past rows of locked bicycles, buried and waiting,/ back where we came from... backwards sledding.” Ages 4–7. [em](Oct.) [/em]