Once Upon a Winter Day
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A boy learns that nature is full of stories to tell when he finds and follows a mouse's tracks in a wintery wood.
Milo wants a story, but his mom is too busy to entertain him. Instead, she encourages him to go out and play in the snow. At first, Milo is disappointed - he doesn't want to play outside, he wants a story.
But when he starts to follow a trail of mouse-prints, he discovers signs of activity all around, prompting him to ask, "What happened here?" Before long, he's using his imagination -- depicted in lush wordless spreads that capture the vividness of Milo's fantasies -- to fill in the gaps. By the time Milo comes home, he's the one with stories to tell.
A must have for the winter season, Liza Woodruff's Once Upon a Winter Day is a fun read-aloud that shares details about animal behavior from a child's perspective.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Milo wants a story, but his busy mother sends him to play in the snow instead. Miffed, he starts following a set of tiny mouse tracks beneath the bird feeder. As he picks up clues (a feather, a fish's skeleton), asks questions ("Who had dug beneath the snow?"), and knits together his observations, he makes up a tale all on his own. And he's not the only storyteller out there: the observant mouse responsible for the tracks is the protagonist of its own exciting drama it must get a juicy red winterberry home without being eaten by a hawk. Woodruff's (A Quieter Story) spare, evocative text ("A cold wind crept beneath Milo's scarf") quietly amplifies her expansive watercolor, pen-and-ink, and colored pencil drawings, which alternate between highly distilled snowy scenes and lushly detailed spreads; in one scene, the mouse scampers past a closely packed herd of velvety brown deer foraging for acorns. It's a richly narrative landscape one that should inspire readers to venture outside and notice stories of their own. Ages 4 8.