by Ellen Byran Obed, Illustrated by Barbara McClintock
ages: 8+
First sentence: “The first ice came on the sheep pails in the barn — a skim of ice so thin that it broke when we touched it.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
There are some books where you can write pages and pages about them. There are other books when one word can sum up everything you read.
Charming.
It’s not really a story, it’s a catalog of winter memories. The progression of winter through ice, from the first crack of ice through building a rink in the backyard, to the melting that comes with spring. The illustrations are lovely, the prose spare, and the result: charming.
It made me miss a real winter, the winters I remember from my childhood (though I’m not sure I’ve ever had a winter like they get in Maine). And it made me wistful that my children don’t get those kind of deep winters that make for good ice here in Kansas.
In short: charming.
The Book Nut 
Perhaps it's the nostalgia that makes it seem a hard sell for students. I adored it for the same reasons you did- missing the winter of '78 when we could skate in the park, or on the creek, or in the backyard if a parent could be convinced to flood it. Sigh.
LikeLike
Yeah, I can see how that could make it a hard sell for the kids. There's just not the nostalgia there to make it work for them.
LikeLike