Frostfire

Sibling one-upmanship and sibling love are on full display in Frostfire, an imaginative story gently told and delicately illustrated by author and paper artist Elly MacKay.

Celeste and her big sister Miriam live in a winter wonderland of muted pink snowbanks and glistening ice. The siblings are paper cutouts layered on top of the landscape, adding dimension to the illustrations. The two girls are out for a walk when Miriam proclaims to hear the roar of dragons, something about which she is an expert, she says.

It’s all to scare her little sister, of course, and Celeste becomes unnerved. Miriam is emboldened, announcing that dragons are hiding amid the very snowbanks where they’re walking, and that a frost pattern on a window is frostfire, the breath of dragons.

There isn’t one challenge Celeste poses that Miriam can’t invent an answer for, including where dragons go in summer. This is where Miriam begins to slip up, insisting that there are penguins in the North Pole, something Celeste knows isn’t true.

When Celeste goes off on her own in the woods, her most dreaded moment happens. She sees a dragon (that looks a lot like a fox, except with paper-thin dragony wings).

Miriam couldn’t believe it. “You saw a snow dragon?”

“Of course, Look, there it is,” said Celeste.

Camouflaged to look like a cloud!”

…And then…she really could see it.

Miriam’s tail bristled.

There it was!

The dragon is an amiable fellow, too. Celeste sees he is harmless, totally unlike Miriam’s imaginings.

The story ends with the big sister learning from her younger sibling, and they both fall in the snow and make snow angels until the dragons move on in the sky above.

Owen Sound, Ontario, resident MacKay is a gifted artist who creates miniature worlds out of paper and photographs them for her own picture books (Frostfire is her 17th) and those she illustrates for others, including The Enchanted Symphony (www.cmreviews.ca/node/4044) by Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton.

Frostfire will be a good book for siblings to read together and giggle over, for parents to read with all their kids together. Children will identify with the love you/hate you relationships that being a sibling creates.