My Winter City

July 15, 2019
A father and child enjoy a frigid day together in the city. In first-person narration, with a definite sense of ownership, a youngster describes winter in an urban setting. "My winter city holds early light / around us, / a moment before sunrise, / silent, / still." Nothing is plowed, nothing is touched. There is just the young tot peering out the window, looking at the snow. Then, with toboggan firmly in tow, the duo (along with a pup) sets off outside. The serene silence has changed. "My winter city is a soup of salty slushes, full of sliding buses / splashing, spraying, sploshing, soaking walkers on the sidewalk." They squeeze into the bus with other damp riders, all fogging up the windows. Then they emerge into a new scene--a park. "My winter city is a deep-freeze / vision of big icy sled hills / and towers that rise up through / far-away skies." The buildings loom large behind trees and newly cut sledding tracks. Snowflakes continue to dot the sky throughout the adventure, all the way until home again. This specific setting may be unfamiliar to some readers, but the narrator opens the end to varied possibilities: "That's my winter city. // What's yours?" Clement surprises readers with unexpected compositions, crowding them into the bus with all the passengers then pulling back and up for a bird's-eye view of the city street. Father and child both present white, but the community they inhabit is a diverse one. A delicious, snow-filled slice of life. (Picture book. 3-6)

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Starred review from October 21, 2019
Lyrical language and detailed watercolors capture a child’s first-person observations on a snowy city outing. Framed with the repeated phrase “my winter city,” the text mixes sharply observed sights, sounds, and feelings to evoke place specifics: “My winter city is a soup of salty slushes, full of sliding buses/ splashing, spraying, sploshing, soaking walkers on the sidewalk.” Clement’s paintings use twitchy lines and muted colors to bridge moments that Gladstone’s text elides—showing the child on the bus, for example, to illustrate “Water runs fast down the aisle past wet boots and toboggans”—and conveying the singular mix of bustle and stillness that city residents experience on snowy days. It’s a diverting excursion, down to the sled ride home: “My winter city is an afternoon journey/... past rows of locked bicycles, buried and waiting,/ back where we came from... backwards sledding.” Ages 4–7.