SNOW WONDER

Rhyming sentences celebrate the joys of winter, from sledding, skating and building snowmen to baking cookies, sipping cocoa and reading by the fire. Woolf’s flat, sharp-edged digital illustrations depict a happy family engaging in all these activities, smiles firmly fixed on faces. The vocabulary is entirely appropriate to the level (Step into Reading 2), although the lockstep rhythm will generate some odd accents to keep the scansion. It’s a workmanlike, unassuming contribution to the body of literature for early readers—while it’ll get the job done, one wishes it could have been executed with a bit more subtlety, both visually and textually. (Early reader. 4-6)