As The Winter Bird opens, creator Kate Banks cleverly invitations younger readers to place their inference expertise to work as she describes the change in seasons. “It was the time of year when the sun went to bed early,” she writes. “The big brown bear lumbered off to its winter den. . . . And the birds prepared to fly south.” But a nightingale, a spring fowl, stays stranded on the bottom by a damaged wing. “What will happen to me?” it sings.
A close-by barn owl tells the nightingale that it must keep behind and study the methods of winter. Over the months that comply with, the nightingale sees snow for the primary time, a rabbit invitations the fowl to take shelter in its burrow, and squirrels share their meals with the fowl. Eventually, the nightingale learns the way to maintain heat by itself and to forage for its personal meals. It even survives a blizzard with the opposite creatures, breaking the storm’s “eerie hush” with a track of “summer’s sweetness” and then an ode to “winter’s wonders.”
Banks’ satisfying prose is evocative and full of figurative language. Cold creeps “in on icy feet,” and the blizzard covers “the world in a shimmering blanket.” Meanwhile, in full-bleed spreads, illustrator Suzie Mason successfully brings winter to the web page. Her colour palette grows more and more darkish because the season units in and the animals retreat. In two spreads, she locations readers behind the rabbit and nightingale within the rabbit’s burrow, looking on the falling snow together with the wide-eyed creatures. As spring arrives, Mason punctuates snowy spreads with vivid greens, and by the ultimate unfold, inexperienced sings from each inch of the pages.
The Winter Bird is an earnest anthropomorphized story. Its creatures assist and encourage each other, forming a sort and tightknit group that transforms the nightingale. As Banks displays, “It was a spring bird, but it had become a winter bird, too.”
Discussion about this post