Once Upon a Northern Night
Jean E. Pendziwol and Isabelle Arsenault
Walker Books
‘Once upon a northern night/ while you lay sleeping, / wrapped in a downy blanket. /I painted you a picture.’ (The opening line of this lyrical prose poem directed towards a sleeping child one dark, soon to be snowy, night is repeated at the beginning each subsequent verse.)
As more and more snowflakes fall, the earth is ‘wrapped in a downy blanket’, the night sky alive with ‘sparkling specks of white, /crowding/ and floating.’

Gradually the whole landscape is transformed as the writer word paints a picture taking readers for a walk beneath the trees, under one of which a mother deer and her fawn stand before moving on to taste (as on the cover) a frozen apple still clinging to the tree. I was reminded here of Robert Frost’s Two Look at Two
while the whole thing has a feeling of his ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’ about it.

Who one wonders, is the speaker of this lullaby– a loving parent, nature itself perhaps? Some enchantress?
Wonderfully evocative and breathtakingly and starkly beautiful are the hushed scenes painted by Isabelle Arsenault using an effective limited colour palette predominantly black and white, grey and blue,

but with yellow for the owl’s eyes and beak, touches of green foliage, those red apples and ‘auburn’ for the fox’s tail.

I love everything about this book: the circularity of the whole thing, the almost ethereal nature of the illustrations with their shadowy effects, and the reverence of the words themselves – ‘pine trees held out prickly hands/ to catch the falling flakes.’
Truly it sends shudders down the spine, such is it’s magic, both verbal and visual.
If you want something to generate awe and wonder in listeners and readers this book will surely do so.

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