I Am the Mountain

Twining seasonal and sensate perceptions across a four-part narrative, this serene and arresting picture book from Weinberg (What Is Color?) offers readers a full-bodied education in encountering the natural world. A mountain introduces itself with unhurried brevity: “I am rocks. I am old. I am wise. I am dirt.” An entity that senses but doesn’t see visitors, it invites readers to follow suit and explore its changing rhythms without utilizing sight. Winter is for touch (“Feel where the sun isn’t”), spring for smell (“the rain... the mud”), summer for hearing (a “newt crawling”), and autumn for ample tastes (“sweet bites, sour bites”). In each section, subtle shifts conveyed in gentle imperatives (“Feel the shadows shrink.... Feel the snowflakes land”) playfully culminate in a rhetorical turn (“See?”) in which the mountain’s revelations circle back to a different kind of seeing: understanding. Along the way, sumptuous watercolors offer plenty to savor visually in landscapes that vary between atmospheric abstraction, impressionism, and field-sketch-like detail. Flakes riot like confetti across a blue-gray background, snow melts within a stand of mud-season trees, a bright yellow “BOOM!” heralds a summer thunderstorm, and an autumn forest appears in olive and russet slashes. The result is a profoundly layered narrative that practices what it preaches, urging readers to slow down, attend with every sense, and appreciate the myriad ways a terrain’s riches reveal themselves. Ages 4–8. Agent: Marcia Wernick, Wernick & Pratt. (June)