Laurel Snyder

The first review of the new year is GOOD.  And what’s more… it’s The Horn Book!

I haven’t seen a print copy yet, but (in theory) this is what it says:

High-spirited milkmaid Lucy lives with her kind but distant father and excessively well-behaved sister in the village of Thistle in the “Bewilderness.” Her best friend, Wynston, is a timid prince, and her mother, Nora, is a mystery: “Mama was there, and then…she was gone.” Frustrated after Wynston’s father gives her the brush-off (“You’re common, my dear, no matter how sweet you happen to be”), Lucy sets off into the Scratchy Mountains, determined to assert her independence while looking for clues to her mother’s disappearance. Wynston follows, but on a different path, and the two have separate adventures, Wynston’s involving a man stuck in a soup pot and Lucy’s with a prairie dog called Cat. The friends are reunited—and run into trouble—in a highly regulated town at the top of the mountain. Snyder’s breezy text incorporates droll humor, especially in the songs Lucy composes to keep herself company: “When climbing up a mountain, / be sure to bring your feet— / You’ll need them to escape from / hungry lions that you meet.” An undercurrent of sadness also flows: this is very much a story about missing mothers and coming to terms with loss. Old-fashioned black-and-white illustrations framed within scrolls make creative use of scale to heighten drama while reinforcing the tale’s once-upon-a-time nature.

YAY!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 9:31 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.