RIVER TOWN

The Geiserts continue their panoramic documentation of American small town life with this follow-up to Prairie Town (1998). With perspectives that sometimes hover high overhead, and other times just a bit above ground level, this offers sharp- eyed observers four seasons’ worth of events in a hamlet which is never shown in its entirety. Over a set of wooden captions (“Halloween foretells the end of fall and the beginning of winter. It is a time to turn from work to play”), the illustrator creates a series of finely detailed landscapes, into which he introduces tiny changes, but also a disorienting disassociation of scale by zooming in, for example, on children, then zooming back out for scenes of a train wreck or spring flood. Readers may derive some passing pleasure in locating and poring over successive disasters (and determining their chronology: children skate on one part of the river, while a truck falls through rapidly cracking ice; in the illustration opposite that one, a framed picture of that truck going through the ice hangs in the cafe), but the underlying themes—the co-existence of past and present, the deliberate pace of life and of change—are more clearly evoked in the previous book. (Picture book. 7-9)