My Winter City
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A boy, his father and their dog have a perfect day in a snowy city, illustrated by Governor General’s Literary Award winner Gary Clement.
A young boy wakes up in the early light of a winter morning, pulls on his boots and mittens, and steps out into the snowy city with his dad. They trudge through the snow, their dog bounding along beside them, then a slushy, steamy bus ride takes them to the tobogganing hill for some winter fun. The boy describes all the sights and sounds of the day, from the frost in Dad’s beard and the snow “pillows” in the park, to the noisy clunking snow plows and the singing buskers they pass on their way home. That night, the boy lies awake under cozy covers, reflecting on the day, as snow blankets the world outside his window.
This is winter in the city.
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.3
Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.7
Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, setting, or events.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
