Deep Snow

What can be more Canadian than a book involving snow and snowmobiles. Deep Snow sees a little girl, Ali, who is riding on the back of her father's snowmobile with her older sister, Kate, before deciding to jump off into the very deep snow and disappearing. At her father's urging, Kate also jumps into the hole to assist her sister, an act which then leaves both girls in trouble. After a number of failed attempts, Dad manages to grab his daughters’ ponytails and haul them out. However, the girls' boots have been left behind, and so Dad goes head first into the snow hole to retrieve them, only to get stuck himself. Now the girls must use their ingenuity (and the snowmobile) to rescue Dad. While Dad’s successfully pulled out, the sister’s boots are still in the hole, and so Dad sends them back down, head first with a rope tied to their feet. Unlike his daughters, Dad doesn’t use the snowmobile to pull them out. Readers who have paid close attention to the details in Martchenko’s illustration will have noticed that Dad’s winter jacket sports pilot wings and air force patches, and so....

Munch’s zany text is again complemented by Martchenko’s fun-filled illustrations that extend the text and which include a character not mentioned by Munsch - the goggle and snowmobile safety helmet-wearing family dog.

In the closing two pages of the book, Munsch explains how real life events during his 1991 storytelling visit to Goose Bay, Labrador, provided the basic ingredients for Deep Snow

An earlier version of the story appeared in Munsch More: A Robert Munsch Collection (http://www.umanitoba.ca/outreach/cm/vol12/no6/munschmore.html)