LOOKING FOR PEPPERMINT

While searching for a wandering pup, a capable young narrator leads a tour through the woods, regaling readers with a blend of memories, facts, and nature appreciation.

Cleverly framing the story as a metafictive trek, Eaton creates a narrative as fascinating and dense as the trees in a hemlock forest. The intrepid narrator identifies realistically rendered tree and animal species and shares facts about nearby geology and geography. While the search for Peppermint feels somewhat tangential, information about cool phenomena such as glacial erratics (giant boulders!) will pique and hold kids’ interest. Vivid illustrations with clean black outlines evoke the sunny vibes of a perfect day in the great outdoors, while a crayon-style art-within-art format allows the narrator to share personal stories of her family coming across a coyote protecting her pups or Mom and Dad pulling porcupine quills from Peppermint’s poor nose. These tales have a raw authenticity, which is fitting given that backmatter explains that many stories are drawn from Eaton’s family’s experiences exploring the Adirondack Mountains, where they live. While there’s much to absorb—a plethora of panels, speech bubbles, graphs, and asides from Peppermint—Eaton weaves together the threads into a seamless whole. The family is light-skinned.

Ambitious and engrossing, this field guide may inspire young readers to do some wandering of their own.