A Christmas night
“Somewhere in the city, a little girl looks at the snow and dreams. » In the neighboring houses, everyone is partying, but at her house, silence shares the space with her dad, too busy to have fun. She then puts on her coat and “rushes into the cold of the evening”. In the storm, she moves away from the city and comes face to face with a “figure with woolly hair and slender legs”. In short sentences, tinged with blue ice, cracking branches and the North Star, Linde Faas offers, with Somewhere in the snow, a magical Christmas story. This text is echoed in the illustrations, which show the extent of this vast snow landscape full of fine details, animals and the Northern Lights. In the whiteness of winter, the dark-coated moose and the little girl, tiny in her blue coat, play on contrasts that evoke the unusual side of this encounter. All the beauty of nature and the richness of the connections it allows underlie this story of great possibilities.
Marie Fradette
Somewhere in the snow
★★★★
Linde Faas, translated by Emmanuèle Sandron, Kaléidoscope, Paris, 2023, 40 pages. From 4 years old.
Small in front of the immensity
Oddmund, seven years old, “lively as the wind”, insolent and capricious like no other, obeys nothing and no one. So, one morning, well camped in front of the Barents Sea, he decides to challenge the big blue. But when Kymô, the fiftieth wave of Poseidon’s procession, rises before him, the boy has no idea that this encounter will change the course of his destiny. Under the guise of a tale, Jean-François Chabas offers, in A wave love, a story about the immensity of nature in the face of the smallness of humans, but also and above all a classic learning story. The French author’s refined text is enriched with illustrations by Christel Espié, whose poetic realism suits this seaside story. Wide shots reveal all the beauty and strength of nature, while portraits allow us to take the pulse of the emotion experienced by the central character. If the title preaches excessive sentimentality, the story is on the contrary told with elegance, falling in line with these timeless and universal texts.
Marie Fradette
A wave love
★★★ 1/2
Jean-François Chabas and Christel Espié, Albin Michel jeunesse, Paris, 2023, 40 pages. From 6 years old.
A revisited mushroom cut
In 2020, the international scientific community estimated the number of living species cohabiting on Earth at 10 million, of which 8 million are still unknown to us. Of the number, the species of fungi, although more numerous than those of plants or animals, are still mysterious to us in many respects. It is this unusual and fascinating world that Gaia Stella invites us to discover in her equally unusual If I were a mushroom. This is because beneath the surface of this fruit emerging from the earth twists a complex and endless network of underground tubes, unpredictable but also fundamental in the cycle of life. In this deconstructed documentary, where the narration is shaggy and instructive, we fall in love with a mushroom which freely incarnates to reveal some of its secrets to us. The illustrations with minimalist lines and bright colors light up before the eyes of young people. A veritable visual gallery invaded by mushrooms.
Yannick Marcoux
If I were a mushroom
★★★ 1/2
Gaia Stella, translated by Valérie Picard, Monsieur Ed, Montreal, 2023, 48 pages. From 3 years.
The truth at odds
Disinformation, a growing phenomenon fueled by malice, negligence or ignorance, takes various forms, which are also increasingly sophisticated. Nereida Carrillo, doctoral student in communications and journalist in Barcelona, undertook to popularize the subject and equip new generations to protect them against its deleterious effects in her book Fake news. Everything about the disinformation. A guide to citizen training and a primer for safe use of the wide web, the work fulfills the pretension of saying everything. In fact, this exhaustiveness sometimes creates annoying repetitions, which some playful efforts struggle to alleviate. The result of this demanding and meticulous work remains very relevant, and what’s more, is magnificent. Alberto Montt’s illustrations, in addition to their aesthetic qualities, help to oil the work of popularization. Special mention to Ian Ericksen’s translation, which makes accessible a lexicon which usually tends towards English.
Yannick Marcoux
Fake news
★★★ 1/2
Text by Nereida Carrillo and illustrations by Alberto Montt, translated by Ian Ericksen, 400 coups, Montreal, 2023, 120 pages. From 10 years old