Wolf in the Snow

A young girl walking home through a heavy snowstorm becomes separated from her family at the same time that a wolf cub loses track of its own pack nearby, and Matthew Cordell tells almost the entire story through pictures alone, with only the barest handful of words, mostly the sounds of the storm and the animals, breaking the silence. The girl finds the shivering cub first and carries it through the storm, following the sound of distant wolf howls until she manages to reunite it with its mother and the rest of the pack. Exhausted and now lost herself with the storm still raging, the girl collapses in the snow, and it is the wolves she just helped who begin howling in turn, calling loudly enough that her own search party, her parents among them, are able to find her and bring her home safely.

Cordell paints in loose, freeform watercolor, and the contrast between his two main subjects does real narrative work: the girl is drawn almost cartoonishly simple and round faced, while the wolves carry a far more realistic, almost frightening weight and detail, a choice that keeps the animals dangerous seeming even as the story insists on their capacity for kindness. The minimal text that does appear reads more like sound effects than sentences, which makes this a book especially suited to being acted out or narrated aloud in a child's own words rather than read exactly as printed. It runs forty eight pages, longer than many wordless picture books, and its two parallel stories, the girl lost from her family and the cub lost from its pack, give a reader plenty to point at and discuss on each spread even before either search resolves, which suits preschoolers who like guessing what happens next as much as it suits an adult reading the book slowly for its art.