Cooper (Beach) creates a joyful tribute to family farms in this luminous and lyrical picture book. The text is stately, quiet, and poetic (\u201cMorning chores would be better if they didn't happen every morning\u201d), 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: \u201cTake 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...\u201d A page turn reveals \u201c...a farm,\u201d 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.) — Publisher's Weekly
K-Gr 3—A husband and wife and their two children live on a farm. The heavily illustrated narrative, which begins in March and ends in November, describes how each season brings different sights, smells, and activities. Using a variety of machinery, the farmers prepare for planting, harvesting, and storing crops of feed corn. The children are involved in growing and maintaining a smaller garden of vegetables and feeding the cows and chickens. As the weather becomes warmer, there is time to relax on a tire swing or fish in a creek, but the family will have to make trips into town for supplies and business transactions. While they have plenty to eat, young readers will glimpse some of the hardships of their life. Weather can delay a farmer's plans and nearby wildlife means danger for some of the barnyard animals. The watercolor and pencil artwork, highlighting the open skies and vast prairie fields, complements the text and changes from browns to greens as the temperature rises and falls. Although the text is too long for a read-aloud, and the small images are best appreciated one-on-one, Cooper's book will give children a comprehensive view of farm life, both visually and textually.—Tanya Boudreau, Cold Lake Public Library, AB, Canada
He uses watercolor and pencil for delicate landscapes as well as for smaller figures that have the intriguing quality of inkblots. Cooper's text is full of the day-to-day of farming, progressing from early spring to late fall, and features plenty of understated observations…
—The Washington Post
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.)
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)
