WHEN THE MOON IS FULL

The rhymed text doesn’t match the power of Caldecott-winner Azarian’s hand-colored woodcuts in this journey through the seasons. Each of Pollock’s verses describes the scene: January is Wolf Moon, April is Frog Moon, December is Long Night Moon, and so on. Each verse is followed by a short sentence expanding on the poem’s description, and that sometimes is absurdly self-evident: for May, the Flower Moon, “Many flowers bloom in May.” The verses tend to thud and clunk along, and the author, a Wyandotte Indian descendant, refers consistently to Native Americans in her text as if they were a homogenous group. Question-and-answer pages at the end answer such questions as, “What is a blue moon?” Azarian’s images are beautifully rendered, with an underlying strength to the patterns of flower, cornstalk, ripple, and leaf. A more engaging verbal treatment of this theme is Michael McCurdy’s An Algonquian Year (2000); one would hate to choose between McCurdy’s illustrations and Azarian’s. (Picture book. 5-8)