Snowy Mittens: A Winter Adventure

Snowy Mittens: A Winter Adventure, Shauntay Grant’s newest addition to the “A Let's Play Outside! Book” picture book series, is, yet again, absolutely perfect. Our beloved family, who ventured to the beach in Sandy Toes: A Summer Adventure (www.cmreviews.ca/node/3722), now adventures through a snowy park, across a frozen pond, and back home again. Candice Bradley’s illustrations are cold yet colourful, and it is a joy to rejoin our friends, now in winter.

Again, the premise is simple: a spare, poetic look at black joy through the micro lens of this one family’s snowy day. We join them as they move through a winter park, our perspective shifting to include the winter animals that live in the park too. Bradley’s digital illustrations continue to serve Grant’s text so well. The two mediums work to move the reader along on a winter adventure, exactly as the title has promised.

This time Grant chose to close her work with an in-depth look at squirrels and their winter behaviors. After reading her closing invitation to consider the squirrel, children and their families can reread the book, this time on the hunt for those winter squirrels and their antics. Lovely.

I persist in the critique that the dust jacket does not do this book justice. The end papers, however, are simply breathtaking. Bookshelves that already hold Sandy Toes will welcome the companion text, Snowy Mittens.