Review by Booklist Review
Most picture books about farms tend to be slapstick animal adventures rather than realistic views of daily life. Cooper's latest fills that gap with a quiet, atmospheric portrait of a farm through the seasons. Working in his signature style of loosely rendered figures and simple compositions in pencil and watercolor, Cooper combines beautiful, expansive views of a farm seen from a distance under an endless sky with small, individual images, such as the farm's cats, which younger children will want to point to and count. Like the pictures, the words move from large landscapes to small details. In a spread about May, for example, descriptions of the vast fields that look like an ocean of green mix with lines about the butterflies and bees that zoom through the garden. Filled with sensory details, the brief text has a poetic, stripped-down simplicity that matches the stark images and will read aloud well. Cameo appearances of the farm's animals and children will help hold young people's attention throughout this subtle, handsome view of modern, rural life.--Engberg, Gillian Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cooper (Beach) creates a joyful tribute to family farms in this luminous and lyrical picture book. The text is stately, quiet, and poetic ("Morning chores would be better if they didn't happen every morning"), and the book slowly takes readers through a year of planting, good and bad weather, and ordinary details about farm life. At the same time, Cooper includes enough specific portraits and names to make the book seem like a felicitous cross between fiction and nonfiction. Like a puzzlemaker, Cooper begins with a sequence of cumulative phrases and sketchbook-style paintings: "Take a farmer, another farmer, a boy, a girl. Add a house, two barns, four silos.... Then cattle, chickens, countless cats, a dog. Put them all together and you get..." A page turn reveals "...a farm," broad and serene, stretched across the palest of skies. Delicately shaded watercolors, outlined in black, are a mix of spot art, clustered images, and spectacular spreads that portray the farm and its inhabitants from diverse points of view. The graceful text and serenely stunning illustrations create a portrait both reverent and realistic. Ages 4-8. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 4-From springtime's busy preparations to the after-harvest autumn lull, an industrious family, including the children, sees to the workings of their modern-day farm. Cooper's elegant, loose-lined artwork depicts broad vistas and small-size close-ups, and his narrative twinkles with nitty-gritty imagery, sensory details, and gentle humor. An enlightening and enchanting overview. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Readers who have enjoyed previous outings with Cooper and his sketchbook (Beach, rev. 7/06; A Good Night Walk, rev. 11/05) will be rewarded once again in this through-the-year look at a farm. Four of Cooper's familiar small figures open the book ("a farmer, another farmer, a boy, a girl"); the loosely outlined figures convey character and feeling through posture alone. The following spread, one of Cooper's neat collections of spot art, lays out everything else that makes up a farm -- the buildings, machines and equipment, farmhands, and animals. Constantly varying spreads keep things lively -- from a page that describes several barn cats to spreads of the large farm dwarfed by the immense sky -- capturing the essentials of farm life, big and small. In language both poetic and straightforward, Cooper conveys sights and sounds: "Kernels rattle against the silo's metal sides like someone typing very loud and very fast"; following rain, "the corn all bends in one direction as if to say The storm went that way." Art and text work in tandem; illustrations offer evidence to back up such statements as "When the animals are not eating or sleeping or grooming, they are deep in thought. Or so it seems" or "The farms are disappearing under a rising ocean of corn." It's as thorough and pleasing an introduction to a farm as one could ask of a picture book. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Agriculture receives exhaustive treatment in this text-laden picture book about people, animals and fields on the farm from the beginning to the end of the growing season. While the language rings lyrical and pure, it dominates, detracting from the dappled watercolor-and-line illustrations. Blocks of white space, chunks of text and small watercolor vignettes alternate across double-page spreads, capturing the endless activity of farm life but also creating a disjointed reading experience. When Cooper delivers panoramic vistas of the farm, its barns, fields and big sky, he leaves readers awestruck. Elementary-school readers will fidget, however, as this long picture book continues to deliver details about planting, tilling, the girl, the cat, the cow and weather changes. Their eyes will flit across pages, across too many words and pockets of illustration that leave them jumbled, tired and wishing this farm offered more wide-open spaces and quiet. (Informational picture book. 6-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
