Old Bear by Kevin Henkes (HarperCollins/Greenwillow, $17.99, 9780061552052/0061552054, 32 pp., ages 2-7, September)
As he did with his Caldecott Medal-winning Kitten's First Full Moon, Henkes once again artfully straddles the line between observing animals' true nature and imagining what they might be thinking. Here the author-artist considers what a bear might meditate on during the long stretch from first snow to first thaw (even the front and back of the dust jacket echo this idea). In the opening credits (the copyright and dedication pages), Old Bear walks to the right of a spread, then halfway off the page as a light snow begins to fall. He takes shelter in a hollowed-out giant tree trunk as the snow comes down harder. Then he begins to dream of each season in turn. "He dreamed that spring had come and he was a cub again." Henkes depicts the furry fellow in his youth, curled up in the center of a giant pink crocus ("The flowers were as big as trees"). Yellow and blue butterflies and humongous daffodils dot the landscape. For summer, "the sun was a daisy, and the leaves were butterflies," thick as a hedge; blueberries rain from the clouds above. In autumn, everything turns crimson and golden--"even the birds and the fish and the water." But a touch of blue here and there, in the river, in a waterfall, in the sky, allows children to point to a glimpse of the world as they know it in the painting. The winter sky evokes the Northern Lights, with a crystal-blue and white landscape of newly fallen snow, and the heavens "blazing with stars of all colors." Henkes uses a four-panel window-pane style illustration to depict the ursine hero's restlessness as the sky changes to spring hues outside his den. When Old Bear at long last wakes up, what awaits him is so beautiful that "it took him a minute to realize that he wasn't dreaming." Henkes slyly includes elements in the springtime scene that were present in his dreams during his season-long slumber, beautifully evoking the almost surreal experience of walking out into a spring day filled with blossoms and fragrances, abundant sunlight and butterflies after a long, dark winter. Even youngest children will know just what that Old Bear is feeling.--Jennifer M. Brown
