Boney
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Annabelle discovers an animal bone in the woods and decides to make it her new plaything. But nature ends up moving Annabelle in mysterious ways.
At first, Boney, as Annabelle names him, makes the perfect companion. While Mom is busy with the baby, Boney and Annabelle share a meal, play at the park, and share a bedtime story before Annabelle tucks Boney into his shoebox-bed for the night.
But when creatures run wild through her dreams, Annabelle considers for the first time where Boney really belongs.
This thought-provoking story by award-winning picture-book creators Cary Fagan and Dasha Tolstikova encourages a deeper sense of wonder about the natural world and celebrates the wilderness that lives within us all.
Key Text Features
illustrations
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.3
With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an open-ended picture book focused on a child's internality, young, pale-skinned Annabelle, hiking with her father and dog, finds a good-size bone on the forest floor that piques her curiosity. She wonders if it might have once belonged to a deer, or a bear, or a wolf, each shown in dark silhouettes that call to mind cave art. Annabelle names the now-washed and beribboned object Boney, trucks it to the playground in a wagon, and tucks it into bed in a shoebox, using "rolled-up socks for a pillow." That night, she dreams that she and a deer, a bear, and a wolf are running together through the woods. The next morning, she wakes up sad, and in the quiet scene that follows, Annabelle treats the bone with newfound solemnity. Sly, naïf-style colored pencil, watercolor, and digital illustrations by Tolstikova (The Bad Chair) contribute to an atmosphere of alternating lightheartedness and unease, while Fagan (Water, Water) focuses on Annabelle's attentiveness to her own emotions and physicality ("She went to the mirror and looked at her own sad face") in a poetic volume that raises keen questions about ephemerality, connection, and regard across the natural world. Ages 3–6.
