This lovely picture-book - the third I have read from UK-based Wingedchariot Press, set up to "to translate and publish innovative children's books from across the globe" - is probably the first Finnish children's title I have ever encountered, with the notable exception of Tove Jansson's Moomintroll books. The story of a young girl named Sari, and her summertime trip to Norway's Arctic coast, in the company of her mother and a dried flower she has named Tundra Mouse, it unfolds slowly and quietly, in brief "chapters," creating an astonishing sense of having fallen right into its heroine's world.

There is mystery here, not in the sense of puzzles that need solving, but in the secret corners of the human heart, and the stubbornly opaque depths of the human experience, as seen through the eyes of a young girl. Sari is a child, and like many children, she does not always understand the motivations of the adults around her - in this case, what is driving her mother to return the dried flower Tundra Mouse, a specimen of Alpine Mouse-ear collected when she herself was a girl, to the place where she first found it, in Norway - but she instinctively senses the importance of her mother's journey.

The language in Tundra Mouse Moutain is simply beautiful, perfectly capturing Sari's instinctive sense of wonder at the world around her, and her acceptance of the limitations of her understanding of that world. Standing with her mother on Komsa mountain, overlooking the sea, Sari reflects: "I think Mummy is a secret. I turn away because secrets don't like to be stared at. They might get frightened and decide to hide and I don't want Mummy to go anywhere." Later, on the return trip to Finland, she thinks about what to tell her friend Kaija about her vacation, concluding: "I don't need to tell her about Tundra Mouse. That's Mummy's business. Mummy had a dream about Tundra Mouse. It was only in her dream she understood why she had made a promise to a plant. It's something that can't be explained in words at all. So I'll never really know."

This was an unexpectedly moving book, lyrically told and perceptively attuned to a child's attempts to understand the people and world around her. Riitta Jalonen obviously has great respect for her young readers - enough to know that it is OK not to explain everything, that sometimes the experience is enough. At first I thought I didn't care for the artwork by Kristiina Louhi, but as I read on, I realized that it perfectly suited the gentle, contemplative tone of the story. The text here is rather long for a picture-book, so I would actually recommend this one to chapter-book readers, or young children who can sit still through longer selections. But taking those caveats into consideration, Tundra Mouse Mountain is one of the best picture-books I've read in some time, and I highly recommend it! If only more of Riitta Jalonen and Kristiina Louhi's work would be translated! ( )