PEEPERS

Two sons of a leaf-peeper tour-bus operator can’t get enough of mocking their father’s clients as they ooh and aah over autumn’s glory in the northern New England countryside. As the leaves start to turn, Jim and Andy help their dad uncover the Fred’s Fall Color Tours bus and then squire around the peepers to various classic autumn venues: the beaver pond, the old church graveyard, the fields tricked out with pumpkins and sugar maples and shagbark hickories. The peepers can’t help themselves: “Oh! How beautiful,” they gasp; the beeches bending above the gravestones are “like blessings,” they gush. The boys make moose ears behind their backs, roll their eyes, utter things like “What a ham” when a customer drapes her arm over the shoulders of a scarecrow. But these kids are far from cruel, and they’re not immune to the surroundings either. They look hard at the rafts of leaves drifting down the river and enjoy the bite in the air. By the end of the story, they sit on a rock in the evening, agog at the number of stars in the early winter sky: “Look, how beautiful!” they say, not without a trace of self-consciousness. Bunting’s (Gleam and Glow, p. 1118, etc.) assured voice runs through the story with transporting affability, and Ransome (Quilt Alphabet, p. 1119, etc.) cuts his palette loose to let autumn sing. (Picture book. 6-9)