THE SNOWMAN’S PATH

An air of magical realism hangs about this childhood fantasy strongly echoed in Colón’s combed, golden-toned winter scenes. The footprints that young Nathan leaves in newly poured concrete behind his house look in frosty moonlight as if they might have been left by a snowman. A snowman such as the one Nathan spies from his bedroom window, moving from roof to fence top, wandering down the alleys between houses, gazing wistfully at the moon, singing quiet duets with the wind. Soon Nathan is down in the alley too, in bathrobe and slippers, sharing cookies and dreams with his new friend, dubbed “Sky.” Seeing Sky’s loneliness, Nathan builds a snowwoman, then watches as the two share dances and laughter, and finally fly off together northward, following the cold weather. Glowing greenly beneath the winter moon, Nathan’s carrot-nosed companion, clad in boots, fedora, and long, trailing scarf, seems at once mysterious, and as solidly real as the briefly animated visitor in Raymond Briggs’s Snowman (1978). Pittman (Angel Tree, 1998) gives her young narrator a matter-of-fact tone that enhances the episode’s poignancy. Readers will wish they too lived along that alley. (Picture book. 8-10)