My Winter City

My Winter City begins on the book’s endpapers where nine wordless panels show what we assume to be a father, his son and their dog at the top of snow-covered hill. With the boy and the dog seated on a toboggan, the father supplies the needed push to propel the toboggan forward. The next six panels see the boy and dog sliding down the hill as snow begins to fall more heavily. The final panel finds the boy, led by his dog, trudging back up the steep hill, undoubtedly intending to repeat the fun.

The story inside encompasses an entire day as the narrator’s awakening city is being blanketed by softly falling snow consisting of large, sticky flakes. Gladstone’s text, as voiced by the unnamed boy, poetically speaks to the city’s snowy appearance on this particular day while Clement, via his watercolor spreads, transforms Gladstone’s words into visual images of the increasingly snow-covered city. Imbedded in Clement’s art is also the story of a father and son, accompanied by their dog, who are spending the day together, with tobogganing being their goal activity. At times, Clement illustrates from the boy’s perspective, and so, for example, readers see him engulfed in a sea of adult legs while he’s walking on the street or being dwarfed by adult bodies on a crowded city bus as he and his father (plus the toboggan and the dog!) make their way to the sliding hill. After a full day of walking, sliding, snow angel making and more walking, a tired boy (and his dog) hitch a ride home on a father-pulled toboggan, with bed awaiting.

Although the narrator never identifies “my” city by name, both the author and illustrator live in Toronto, and, in the illustration accompanying the text “The picture is different through the windows of the glass house, / like a warm, rainy summer in a country far away”, Clement’s glass building strongly resembles Toronto’s Allen Garden Conservatory.

The book’s larger physical dimensions, 33 cm x 25 cm, are most appropriate in capturing the city’s size and activity. Clement’s illustrations are chockablock with urban details, including the ubiquitous pigeon. He adds sly adult humour in the details in the bus scene in which many of the standing adults have one hand holding a steadying pole while the other grips an electronic device. A particularly impactful spread consists of an overhead view of three lanes of traffic and a crowded pedestrian-filled sidewalk, with both cars and people making tracks that are being covered over by the heavily falling snow.

At the book’s conclusion, as the boy looks out from his apartment widow at the nighttime city below, the snow still falling, he extends an invitation to the book’s readers.

That’s my winter city.

What’s yours?

Hopefully, parents and teachers will accept the narrator’s offer and return to the book’s contents to, for example, compare and contrast the boy’s experience with how winter presents itself in their community.