Winter A pop-up book

Carter brings readers to a rural, snow-covered landscape, identifying animals and elements of the scenery that include a snowman, yellow farmhouse, snowshoe hares, and white long-tailed weasels who reappear throughout. Among the pop-ups are a cluster of snowflakes that seem to swirl in the center of a spread, three-dimensional pine and oak trees (peering inside a hole in the oak's trunk reveals a pair of wide-awake owls), and a tuft of heather whose flowers pop against the white landscape. It's a restful, getting-ready-for-bed kind of read, thanks to the nighttime setting of most of the scenes, as well as a handful of flaps that allow readers to find various sleeping (or hibernating) animals. Ages 3-5. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A quick, season-centered look-about from a master of paper engineering. Though small of trim size and, at just six openings, not exactly a magnum opus, this survey of a snow-covered country landscape as night falls is well-stocked with visual surprises and late winter sightssome of them mildly oddball. These are placed around a half-dozen elegantly simple pop-up flurries of snowflakes or seasonal flora. There's fauna too, from a snowshoe hare and an alert bobcat to a pair of white weasels who stare quizzically up at viewers in each scene before finally bedding down beneath a flap. Even to very young children, Carter may seem to go a bit overboard by labeling "cloud," "sun," and "moon" along with the at least slightly less recognizable "holly," a leafless "oak tree," "animal tracks," and "Venus." Oddly, to such predictable elements as a snowman, a pine tree, and sprigs of snowberries (all likewise labeled) poking through the white, he adds camellias in bloom, a spray of flowering heather, and even stalks of parasitic, garish red "snowflower." The labels may prove more distracting than illuminating, but this isn't quite the usual sort of stop on the well-worn seasonal round. (Pop-up picture book. 3-5) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.