Angela is born “under the milky Arctic sunlight” and grows up with her father near a glacier. They hike there often and listen, with their whole bodies, to the glacier and its “universe of sound.” This is the enchanting opening to Angela’s Glacier, written by poet Jordan Scott and illustrated by Diana Sudyka in the same beguiling peacock, indigo and duck egg blue colors described as belonging to the glacier.
Scott’s descriptive and evocative text makes this one especially delightful to read aloud: In describing the way Angela’s father would carry baby Angela on his back to visit the glacier, Scott writes that they hiked “through lava fields covered with silver mosses, past chocolate-brown arctic foxes atop raven’s glass, crowberry, and pixie lichen.” With each step they practice pronouncing the glacier’s name: Snæfellsjökull. As Angela grows, she takes the hikes herself. She puts her head to the ice and listens, even whispering her fears to it. In a palette filled with nearly every shade of blue and aquamarine, Sudyka uses textures and graceful, swerving lines to capture the landscape and cold winds of Angela’s favorite place to visit.
School, friends, homework and extracurricular activities consume Angela as a teen: “Time just melted away.” She feels somewhat lost, and her heartbeat sounds strange. Then her father asks, “Have you visited Snæfellsjökull?” Angela heads to that “ancient blue,” and despite knowing she’s not going to stop growing up or being busy, she makes a promise to the glacier to always visit.
Scott’s afterword describes how the story is inspired by his friend Angela Rawlings, who shares her own note about her experience listening to the “gentle” sounds of glaciers in Iceland. She writes how important it is that readers listen to themselves, to each other and “to the ecosystems and their inhabitants who sustain us,” particularly during a time of climate change and species extinction. A warmhearted ode to the colder side of the natural world, Angela’s Glacier gives readers everywhere a chance to ponder the “glacier’s music.”
