Snow Music ANNOTATION
When a dog gets loose from the house on a snowy day, his owner searches for him and experiences the sounds of various animals and things in the snow.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
What does it
take to make
snow music?
A boy and a girl.
Neighbors.
A squirrel, rabbit,
deer, and bird.
Also neighbors.
A dog.
Lost and then found.
And snow falling. Peth.
And melting. Drip.
And falling again.
Peth.
Peth.
Peth.
You can listen.
You can also sing along.
About the Author
Lynne Rae Perkins is the author of three picture books, The Broken Cat, Clouds for Dinner, and Home Lovely, a Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor Book. Her novel All Alone in the Universe was named an ALA Notable Book, an ALA Booklist Editor's Choice, a Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book, and a Smithsonian Magazine Notable Book for Children. She lives with her family in northern Michigan, where it snows all the time.
From the Author:
"I grew up in a small town not far from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We lived on the raw frontier of a new subdivision, where eighteen small ranch houses sat bravely on eighteen lots with tiny sticks of trees and unpaved driveways. To a child, it was a paradise of uninterrupted backyards with unlimited playmates and extra mothers and fathers available if you should happen to need one. Not to mention woods and a creek right nearby.
"I thought we must be the luckiest people on earth. I remember even liking my age and feeling a little sorry for those born in a year other than 1956.
"As I grew older, it slowly dawned on me that there was a larger world, where there were other opinions and ideas, other ways of doing things. Some of them even seemed better than ours. To myperplexity, my parents were less impressed with this news than I was.
"I was also baffled by some other mysteries: Why didn't football players like smart girls? And how could I pick one career and do it every day for forty years? I received little guidance on the first question, but my guidance counselor suggested that architecture would be a good choice for someone with abilities in art and math. So I gave the "different drummer" speech at graduation and went as far away to college as I could imagine going, to Penn State, which was three and a half hours away by car. After three days, during which I concluded that I wasn't nearly as smart as I had thought I was, I fled in terror to the art department.
"What do you think you'd like to do?" asked the adviser.
"I think I'd like to illustrate children's books," I improvised. He laughed heartily. "Who wouldn't?" he said. He advised me to go for a B.A. in art instead of a B.F.A, because I would probably just get married anyway.
"I went for the B.F.A. and met some wonderful I teachers and friends. New worlds were opened to me. I learned to see beauty in unlikely places. My parents thought I was nuts. I was considered a promising student. My parents wondered how I was going to earn a living. So did 1.
"I went to graduate school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Then I had all sorts of jobs while I waited for my real job, my "me," to pop up. I moved to Boston and worked as a graphic designer. All the while, I was reading, drawing, and sometimes writing.
"My husband, Bill, introduced me to the idea of self-employment. We moved to the north woods of Michigan, where we made rustic furniture and grew Christmas trees. I began to spend a lot of time drawing and painting, and as I did, I found my voice. (Somewhere in here, we had two children, Lucy and Frank.) My ideas started to be stories and illustrations, peopled by those I have known and loved and also by those I meet briefly and whose lives I have to imagine.
"I think making books is a way of having conversations with people. I have been on the reader's side for most of my life. When my first book was reviewed and I realized that a few people besides my mother were actually reading it, I felt lucky to think that I could be on this end of the conversation, too. I still do."
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
Just as the story works on all kinds of levels, so does its retelling, and not all of its sound is caught in language. Snow Music offers a sophisticated experience, yet that richness is accessible to all. Perkins's previous work has leapt on to more than one listing of notable books. So will Snow Music.
— Dennis Duffy
Publishers Weekly
Using subtle patterns of shapes, color and onomatopoeic sounds, Perkins (The Broken Cat) invokes multiple experiences and layers of meaning in this complex, imaginative picture book. A scene depicted inside a snow globe on the jacket appears to become the story's setting; in the final illustration, the globe sits on a shelf between a toy car and squirrel (both of which play a role in the story). Waking up after a snowfall, a boy accidentally lets his dog out of the house, then spends the day searching for him. Into this arc Perkins weaves separate, complete moments. For example, one spread shows a gray squirrel and its criss-crossing pawprints on the right, while on the left, lines of type mimic the haphazard pattern of the creature's path: "I think-/ I think/ I left it-/ I think/ I left it/ here-/ somewhere... / I think." Elsewhere Perkins spectacularly recreates the music of a winter's day: the dog, against a solid white background, runs off to the right; on the left, the canine's tags (and his exhalations) are pictured as notes on a musical staff, "jingle huff jingle huff." A car drives by ("poot poot poot poot poot..."); a leaf hits the pavement ("K-tk"); snow falls (the repeated word "peth" cascades down the page, contained in dozens of multihued blue circles). Although the intricate structure (abrupt transitions and multiple shifts in perspective) may make this story challenging for youngest readers, the sophistication of Perkins's melodic, rhythmic and visual orchestration merits attention from older readers. Ages 3-up. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Children's Literature - Nancy Garhan Attebury
Snow music comes with the falling of night snow. The author paints a peaceful, gentle tale here, one readers will love! Characters slip silently through the nighttime hours until dawn. A wintry day blanketed with fresh snow awaits a young boy. The boy peers into the snowy softness. That is when a problem develops. His dog scampers out the open door to explore on its own. The answer is for the boy, and a friend, to explore the snow and search for the dog. Some pages hold snow tracks made by a bird, a deer, and a bushy tailed squirrel. Their activities and the text hold ideas to think about. And then new tracks appear; they are the tracks of the boy and his friend make stamping through the snowy softness. A musical staff illustrated with the dog's breath huffs and the jingles of its collar tags add to the snow music. So do the poot, poot sounds of a frosty car driving through the snow. Snow sounds of the sanding truck play out against the other tracks. Cold, hungry boys, without the dog, go home to eat. Only the reader is apprised of the situation, which shows the dog right under the window of its own home. The day rolls on and the boys head back to the outside world of melting snow. Soon they find the dog. Snow music lingers. Again it begins to snow. We know what will happen. More snow music! This delightful book is one worthy of many reads. 2003, Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins Publishers, Ages 3 to 7.
School Library Journal
PreS-Gr 4-This picture book begins and ends with a whisper of snow. In between, a lost dog, a boy, a girl, a deer, a rabbit, and a squirrel cross paths as readers follow their tracks through the vast white of the pages. The tracks are both textual and pictorial as they create meandering word patterns and paint pictures of footprints in the snow. From the "peth, peth, peth" of the falling snow to the "jingle, huff, jingle, huff-" of the runaway dog, the text sings. The written word becomes a choral reading with solo voices while the ink-and-watercolor illustrations add another dimension to the composition. On some pages the paintings add a hush to the music; on others they brighten the song. White backgrounds create a crisp cold day, while more colorful, painterly pages realistically picture the rural neighborhood. This title will harmonize well with Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day (Viking, 1962) and other wintry favorites.-Carolyn Janssen, Children's Learning Center of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An uncomplicated story about a boy who awakens to the wonder of an overnight snow, opens his backdoor, accidentally lets his dog escape, and searches for his pet with a neighbor. Endpapers covered with snowflake notes signal that in Perkins's hands, this is anything but ordinary. As the title indicates, this is a visual and textual choral piece that includes opportunities for listeners to join in. It opens with the susurrant sound of the falling snow and the invitation that "everyone whisper." Members of the "ensemble" (bird, rabbit, squirrel, deer, dog, children) are introduced as the day begins. Text replicates the shape of tracks left in the snow, which sometimes become the onomatopoetic sounds that make the snow music. Tire tracks become musical staffs. The watercolor palette is icy blue and white, and earthy brown with touches of color like the red in the dog's tags and boy's boots. The story comes full circle, ending with the snow globe on the cover . . . a miniature replica of the children's whisper-quiet winter world. Masterful and unique. (Picture book. 4-7)
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