Hooray for Snow!

The action in this Japanese author/artist’s English-language debut is low-key: three diminutive squirrels go sledding with their father, and Papa, initially reluctant, discovers that sledding keeps you warm in the cold. The rewards lie in Iwamura’s exquisitely rendered winter landscapes, inked with whispering lines and colored with the palest of tints. He has a talent for imagining what the world looks like to small creatures. While the squirrels’ pointy ears, fluffy tails and matching sweaters make them embraceably cute, the forest they live in is painted in noble proportions, with gigantic mist-covered tree trunks (only the lowest foot or two of which are shown, in accordance with the squirrel’s-eye view), grasses weighed down under coats of snow and delicate branches outlined in white. No detail is overlooked; even the two eyelet screws that hold the rope to the sled are clearly drawn. The single interior scene, with its squirrel-sized Japanese teapot and teacup sitting by the woodstove, repays a long look, too. Ages 3–up. (Jan.)