PPBF: Snow

Today's Perfect Picture Book Friday pick

Snow, by Uri Shulevitz

Snow
Written and illustrated by Uri Shulevitz

Scholastic, 1998
Grade K-2, word count 707

Themes:
Winter, Imagination


Opening:
The Skies are gray.
The rooftops are gray.
The whole city is gray.

Synopsis:
Snow is a simple picture book about a boy traveling through the town trying to convince the passers-by to look up and see the snow flakes beginning to fall. It perfectly captures a child's excitement as the first flake drifts down. He begins to count them, one, two, three. The bustling townsfolk can't be bothered or don't believe him. When the town is finally blanketed in white, magical things begin to happen. The boy dances with nursery rhyme characters from the local bookstore and off into the night.


What I Love:
I love how Snow is so simple, yet so complex. At the heart of the story is childlike wonder at simple miracles like snow. The town is transformed from gray to white. The buildings take on a fairy tale quality, which is emphasized by the magic of the storybook characters coming to life. I love the grumpy, goofy, ridiculous members of the town, too absorbed in themselves to notice or to care about the first snowfall. Uri Shulevitz is a master at telling the story through subtle color change. He evokes emotion through placement of the illustrations on the page. At first the pictures are confined to small squares with lots of white space on the page, then gradually, the illustrations go to full bleed (off the edges of the page) as the town is buried in snow. This book is a lovely example of how illustration transforms text into something more, though in this case, the illustrator / author planned the visuals as a storytelling element right from the inception.

via Craftionary

Bonus: 
1. You can purchase a lovely signed poster from Snow on Books of Wonder.
2. Read Uri Shulevitz's book Writing With Pictures. (Review by Harold Underdown) I promise, you'll look at creating picture books in a whole new way.
3. Craft a collection of paper snowflakes gathered by Decornos or try the app from Flash and Math to understand the geometry involved using virtual paper snowflakes.
4. Make a variety of snowglobes from Craftionary.com
5. Check out these and more Perfect Picture Books at your local library.

Reviewed by Beth

Reviewed by Susanna

Reviewed by Joanna

Reviewed by Joanne

Have you reviewed a Perfect Picture Book along this theme? Please leave the link in the comments below. Thanks!

Check out all the recommended titles for Perfect Picture Book Friday
for November 20, 2015 available on Susanna Leonard Hill's blog.