TITLE: Stormy
By Guojing (Schwartz & Wade Books, Sept. 17), ages 3-7, 40 pages, $17.99 hardcover, $10.99 eBook
STORY: This book is about loneliness, awareness, patience, the power of play, kinship, determination — peril — and the sweet haven of home, and it describes all that without words.
In a winter-sere park, a button-nosed scruffy dog huddles under a bench. One day a woman notices him and tries to make friends, but he runs away. Day by day, she returns. She cajoles him with a ball. Trust builds. They play. She leaves the ball with him when she walks home. One day, he slips after her unseen. He drops the ball on the sidewalk below her apartment and waits.
A pounding, dark, dark thunderstorm descends. Soaked, he tucks tail and crawls under a box beside a trashcan — just before she rushes into the storm, past him, headed for the park, exposed to rain, wind and then, dejection. But she is observant, and as she returns home, she sees that ball. She finds him.
Artist Guojing won accolades in 2015 for her first book, The Only Child, which used gray and silvery illustrations to evoke poverty, winter chill and the wondrous inner world of imagination that saves a lone child from feeling lost. She dedicates Stormy "For my lost dog, DouDou: I miss you."
Read to Me is a weekly review of short books.
Style on 09/16/2019