The sounds of the falling snow and animals walking, the trucks, and the conversations all make up music in the winter-time. This is a good book for the coming winter season. ( )

Beautiful illustrations and story that is engaging and interactive. ( )

This book was not terrible; however, I did not care for it very much. The first reason I found myself not gravitating toward this book is because of its choppy writing style. For example, one page of the book had text that read “It found the snow, and the deer’s cold feet” when it was talking about the sun coming out, and the next page read “There he is! I see him” in reference to two children playing hide-and-go-seek in the trees of a forest. These two pages have nothing to do with one another, and it makes reading the book confusing and awkward which is why I did not resonate very much with this writing style. One aspect of the book that I did appreciate was the resemblance some of the pages had to actual sheet music. For example, one page in the book was titled “A Car Went By” and under that title was the text of the page placed in between a grand staff and had onomatopoeia under musical notes that made the sound of a car passing by. I liked this aspect of the book because it caught my attention due to my love for music, however because this was not done throughout the book and was only used on a few pages, this added to the choppy writing style, thus creating a bit of confusion for me. Overall, the main idea of the book was to detail some aspects of the time period between winter and spring and to highlight those aspects by playing into the reader’s senses such as sight when the author placed the text on the page to resemble a deer’s footprints and hearing with making the text look like musical lyrics and pairing that with the use of onomatopoeia. ( )

The children enjoyed this one very much. We shared the book as a kind of choral reading, with children performing the parts of the speakers, and acting out the sounds the author gives for trucks passing by, the sound of the falling snow, or the sigh of the rising wind. The clever conceit throughout the book is that winter in this small town creates a kind of music, so Perkins has shown snowflakes as musical notes, and a "score" for the sounds made by a car passing by with its radio playing, a dog that has slipped its leash, or a salt truck barreling down the road. The illustrations are lovely, with a muted winter palette.This is a great book to read on a snowy day! ( )

This story finds the song in the snow. The author shows that there is music all around us. The sound of sow falling “Peth”, the sound of breathing “huff”. If we listen, we can hear it, and even contribute. This story features neighbors coming together to look for a lost dog amongst all the music. The illustrations are wonderfully done. Perkins captures the calm and beauty of nature during winter in her detailed rendering of animals. She blends her colors in a way that evokes feelings of softness and calm from readers.

Details: This book was written to interst children in grades K-3 and is on a 2.6 reading level. ( )