Angela Leeper

Otter is just looking for dinner when he finds love—with a fish. Focusing on her beautiful eyes, Otter no longer sees Myrtle as a food source. Myrtle feels a tug in her own heart and returns his affection as they play hide-and-seek and watch the stars. The story should end there, but the other pond animals find Otter, who’s always been a little odd, even odder with his new love interest. Some even call it unnatural.

Otter comes to his senses (according to the neighboring naysayers, that is) and resigns himself to living alone. Chris Raschka’s deceptively simple, childlike artwork, rendered in watercolor washes and thick colored pencil, evokes both Otter’s budding romance and crushing loss. After swimming by Beaver’s dam one day, Otter’s spirit is renewed, as Beaver helps Otter realize that love can take many paths, “that there is the way of the otter and there is the way of the heart.” Choosing the latter, Otter and Myrtle resume their lives—and love—together.

James Howe expertly crafts this modern fable to be read on many levels. Although adults may read more into the muddied relationship, even young children will recognize the strength of staying true to oneself. Otter’s reflective tale gives hope and validity to love everywhere.

Do children really need another story about Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan? If it’s Deborah Hopkinson’s enthralling picture-book biography, then the answer is an overwhelming yes. Blending riveting narration with portions of actual letters Sullivan wrote to her own teacher at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, the author begins with the arrival of 20-year-old Sullivan and her first charge, six-year-old Helen, who “was like a small, wild bird, throwing herself against the bars of a dark and silent cage.”

While the book does feature such famous scenes as Helen’s dinner disaster and her breakthrough at the water pump, the focus is on Helen’s need for language and how Sullivan taught her to communicate. Using the world as Helen’s classroom, Sullivan helped her understand sound by placing frogs and crickets in her hands, which allowed her to feel them vibrate as they croaked and chirped. The teacher even found ways to teach abstract concepts like thinking.

Readers may associate Helen’s learning with sign language, but Sullivan also showed her pupil how to read with raised alphabet letters and Braille. On her first trip away from home in 1887, Helen was able to write a letter home to her mother. Illustrated with award winner Raul Colón’s muted watercolors, the book also includes numerous black-and-white photographs, a copy of Helen’s letter to her mother and a Braille alphabet on the back cover for young readers to practice Helen’s skills. Most importantly, Hopkinson shows how in the process of learning to communicate Helen also learned to be a girl again.

With the ease of buying milk at the grocery store today, many children now know very little about where milk comes from. Recalling her own delightful memories of growing up on a Minnesota dairy farm, Phyllis Alsdurf lets children vicariously experience the hard yet joyful work in It’s Milking Time. The blend of her poetic text— with “cuds a-chewing, / tails a-swatting, / hooves a-pounding”—and the accompanying paintings in soft, muted colors gives a nostalgic feel to this gentle story.

After a young girl leads a parade of Holsteins into the barn, she helps her father feed and prepare them to be hooked up to the milker. As each one of the alphabet of cows (“Alphie, Bertha, Cassie, Di . . .”) finishes, Dad empties the milk into a pail and carries it to the milking house, where the milk is strained and ends up in a milking can. Finally, it’s stored in a cooler until it can be picked up the next day, taken to the creamery and made into butter and cheese or placed in bottles for stores.

When the cows head back to the fields, there’s still more work to do, such as shoveling manure into gutters to be used later as fertilizer and scrubbing the milkers and strainers. Although milking requires never-ending diligence, it’s not all drudgery. The girl relishes the responsibility of feeding the cows; petting and giving milk to the calves; and spending time with her father. And in the morning, after her mother skims the cream off the top, there’s fresh milk to drink with her pancakes.

Fans of Jane Yolen’s Owl Moon, with its quiet father-daughter bond, will adore this equally beautiful and loving book—and learn more about their favorite drink in the process.