Wintertime picture book a delight

It comes as no surprise that the short list in the children’s literature/text category for this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards includes novels worth reading — The White Bicycle, by Beverley Brenna (Red Deer Press); Becoming Holmes: The Boy Sherlock Holmes, His Final Case, by Shane Peacock (Tundra Books); Counting Back From Nine, by Valerie Sherrard (Fitzhenry & Whiteside); and The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B, by Teresa Toten (Doubleday Canada).

What is a bit surprising is that the fifth title is that of a picture book: Once Upon a Northern Night, by Jean E. Pendziwol. And while its text certainly deserves the nomination, the surprise is that its equally amazing illustrations (by Montreal’s Isabelle Arsenault) failed to be similarly honoured (although the artist did make the short list on the French side, for a totally different book — Jane, le renard & moi — whose author, Fanny Britt, was shortlisted for text).

Once Upon a Northern Night is a perfect bedtime book, aimed at ages four to eight.

Arsenault’s images give Pendziwol’s lyrical poem added dimension. The opening line (“Once upon a northern night / while you lay sleeping, / wrapped in a downy blanket, / I painted you a picture”) is accompanied by a full-page illustration of a sleeping boy, snug in bed with only the top half of his head above the blanket, against the backdrop of a dark wall framing a window that looks out on an even darker night.

By the time the child opens his eyes to a window frame now filled with white, and perches on his bed to look outside, the scene that greets him is a minor miracle. “I painted you a picture,” he is told, “And then / I had the moon gently kiss you / and the wind whisper / I love you.”