I’m often asked by teachers for mentor texts. Short prose pieces, picture books, or maybe a memoir that offers students vivid images or parallel construction, or creates a particular mood. It can be tricky to find the perfect offering, so it’s always exciting to come across a title that will satisfy a number of requests across a range of grades and disciplines. Ellen Bryan Obed’s Twelve Kinds of Ice (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), an ode to childhood and winter, is one of those books. The prose is elegant, the descriptions lush, and sense of joy inescapable.

One sentence describes the first ice of the season: “The first ice came on the sheep pails in the barn—a skim of ice so thin that it broke when we touched it.” The second ice “was thicker. We could pick it out of the pails like panes of glass. We could hold it up in our mittened hands and look through it. Then we would drop it on the hard ground to watch it splinter into a hundred pieces.” “Field Ice,” “Stream Ice,” “Black Ice,” “Garden Ice,” “Late Night Skate,” and other vignettes describe the progress of the ice—its texture, look, and even sound, from late fall to early spring—and the excitement that the advent of ice—and ice skating—represented in the lives of one family, their friends, and their neighbors.

Here’s a description of “Stream Ice.”

“If the nights continued cold, stream ice came quickly after field ice. Dad took us in the car up the road to the stream where we had fished for trout in the spring. We sat down on its hard brown bank to tie up our skates. Then we followed Dad as he followed the stream. Sometimes we’d stop and lie down on our stomachs. We’d put our eyes close to the ice to watch the little fish and slender reeds moving in the cold current of the streambed. Then we’d follow Dad again until the stream smalled to a brook of bent alders. We tried to see how far we could skate between branches, over stones, and around old logs. All afternoon the stream was ours until it was time to take off our skates and walk back to the car. All the way home we talked about…”

The book spans four seasons, ending with “Dream Ice,” “the ice that came in our sleep” that could be skated on during those “hot” nights. Share this gem of a book at storytime, with literacy and science classes, and any opportunity you have.

Twelve Kinds of Ice (Obed)
©2012 by Barbara McClintock

Excerpt from Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed, illus. by Barbara McClintock, reprinted with permission by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

ROSE, Caroline Starr. May B.: A Novel. Random/Schwartz & Wade. 2012. ISBN 9781582463933. JLG Level: B+ : Upper Elementary & Junior High (Grades 5-7)

Life on the prairie is never easy, but hiring May as a servant for his newlywed bride is not enough to keep a pioneer’s wife from running away. In tense verse, May’s story unfolds as she attempts to survive alone on a neighbor’s homestead while the husband goes off in search of his love. May’s struggles with reading strengthen her characterization, as readers begin to understand her crippling inner fears. Told she was incapable and stupid, May learns how strong she really is after learning to live on her own over a period of months. As memorable as a tale from the “Little House” series, May B. just may be a new long-standing favorite.

OLDER, Jules. Snowmobile: Bombardier’s Dream Machine. illus. by. Michael Lauritano. Charlesbridge. 2012. ISBN 9781580893343. JLG Level: NE : Nonfiction Elementary (Grades 2-6)

Imagine a world that stops when it snows. Imagine having a sick child in the dead of winter and no way to get across the snow to take him to the doctor. Imagine that your father wants you to be a priest when you grow up, but all you can think about is building and inventing things—and motors. Such is the world of Joseph-Armand Bombadier who grew up in a little Quebec village in the early 1900s. Joseph’s dream is to become a mechanic, so at age 17 he leaves home for Montreal. His genius, coupled with hard work and determination, make him an excellent student and mechanic. He returns home to face his family. His father has a change of heart and builds him a garage where he goes on to invent a vehicle that will travel across snow.

Older writes a hi-interest story about an inventor that will capture reluctant readers. Short chapters and realistic dialogue add to the facts of this biographical retelling of the origins of the snowmobile and of a man who lived his dream.

OBED, Ellen Bryan. Twelve Kinds of Ice. illus. by Barbara McClintock. Houghton Harcourt. 2012. ISBN 9780618891290. JLG Level: I : Independent Readers (Grades 2-4)

One family lives through a season of twelve kinds of ice, giving readers an opportunity to experience the passing of time with the beauty of winter. The first ice forms a thin skin over the water in a bucket that leads to the last ice―the melting ice that reveals the lost puck or skate guard. Ice in all its forms and the activities that bring everyone together make Twelve Kinds of Ice a new seasonal classic. Seamlessly complemented by McClintock’s gorgeous pen-and ink-illustrations, Obed’s text describes a family that plays and celebrates together. It’s a tale of winter, a tale of families, and a tale not to be missed.

MATTESON, George and Adele Ursone. The Christmas Tugboat: How the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Came to New York City. illus. by James E. Ransome. Clarion. 2012. ISBN 9780618992157. JLG Level:  P : Primary (Grades K-1)

George Matteson was a tugboat captain who was chosen to transport the Christmas tree to Rockefeller Center. Ransome’s paintings bring his family’s story to life, based on the night he took his wife and daughter to tow the barge laden with the gigantic tree. Even in the dark of night, the family seems warm and cozy. The joy of the event is punctuated by the bright colors of tour boat’s balloons and the giant Christmas tree balls on the barge. Husband and wife team share a wonderful moment in their family history that also belongs to all who love the Rockefeller tree.

FRIEDMAN, Lise and Mary Dowdle. Becoming a Ballerina: A Nutcracker Story.  Viking. 2012. ISBN 9780670013920. JLG Level: CE : City Elementary (Grades 2-6)

Fiona’s life is full of ballet. This year she will dance the role of Clara in the Boston Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker. Her sisters will also dance in the ballet. Becoming a Ballerina tells the story from audition to opening night of Fiona’s family’s participation in this dream of all ballerinas. From the stress of callbacks to the surprises of things that don’t go quite right during the performance, readers get an inside look at the hard work and dedication that goes into the creation of a production. Documented by many behind-the-scenes photographs, Fiona and her family also make a great introduction for newcomers to the classic ballet.

For ideas about how to use these books and links to supportive sites, check out the Junior Library Guild blog, Shelf Life.

Junior Library Guild is a collection development service that helps school and public libraries acquire the best new children’s and young adult books. Season after season, year after year, Junior Library Guild book selections go on to win awards, collect starred or favorable reviews, and earn industry honors. Visit us at www.JuniorLibraryGuild.com.

Frances Foster accepting her Carle Honor. Photo by Johnny Wolf.

Frances Foster was honored last month by the Eric Carle Museum, which awarded the renowned children’s book editor with a Carle Honor in the mentor category. School Library Journal took the opportunity to ask Foster to reflect on her career editing some of the biggest stars in children’s publishing, from Roald Dahl to Peter Sís.

Legend has it that an angel was instrumental in getting you started in children’s books. Is that true?

So it seemed. I called on Alice Dalgliesh, founding editor of the children’s book department at Scribner’s, without an appointment (what was I thinking?). I was applying for a job and thought Scribner’s would be a good place to start. I had spent many hours browsing in the Scribner bookstore on the ground floor of 597 Fifth Avenue, so it was a short and easy step from there to Ms. Dalgliesh’s office on the sixth floor. I was green, new to the city, and new to job-hunting, so it never occurred to me that she wouldn’t see me. As it happened, when she heard why I had come, she welcomed me and said, “An angel must have sent you.” Her assistant had given notice that very morning, so yes, there was an opening that needed to be filled, and I was hired on the spot. From that moment on, I have believed in angels and in luck.

What was it like working at Scribner’s in its iconic building on Fifth Avenue in New York City?

A. It was amazing, both real and unreal. There was so much history living in that building. I felt surrounded by ghosts. Mine was the desk where Thomas Wolfe perched to view the various Fifth Avenue parades; the fifth floor was where Ernest Hemingway and Max Eastman had their famous fistfight in Maxwell Perkins’ office. Mr. Scribner, who Ms. Dalgliesh referred to as “young Mr. Scribner” or simply “Charlie,” was now the second generation of Scribners to head the publishing house. He and Dalgliesh were on easy terms with each other since she had known him throughout his childhood. From my position, it seemed that she and her office was his confessional; I can still hear her placating him with, “Now Charlie….” and a word of reassurance. With none of the offices, not even Mr. Scribner’s, being fully enclosed, it was an impossible place to keep secrets. Even whispered conversations eventually became public.

Such was the case when Igor Krupitsky, head of the rare books department at Scribner’s, unearthed a painting of Robert Louis Stevenson signed by John Singer Sargent in an upper floor storage closet. Yale University, where the Stevenson papers reside, was immediately contacted, and though they questioned the authenticity and very existence of such a portrait, it was shipped off to them… and quickly returned. Yale rejected it as a fake on all counts. It wasn’t Stevenson, and the signature was forged. The painting then stood on a table in Scribner’s office, prompting all who entered to ask about it, so those of us who were within earshot heard the story of Yale’s shortsightedness many times repeated, until one day Scribner’s mother visited and set the record straight. It was a portrait of a Scribner uncle painted by another uncle and signed “Sargent.” In short, it was a family joke that quickly became a company joke, though some of us thought it was funnier than Mr. Scribner did.

You were Roald Dahl’s editor for six of his books. A notoriously difficult author—true?

Bob Gottlieb, who headed up Knopf’s adult department, was Dahl’s true editor, but I was the editor of record for five or six of his children’s books, including Danny the Champion of the World (1975), George’s Marvelous Medicine (1982), and The Enormous Crocodile (1978, all Knopf). And yes, he lived up to his legend, but I should make clear that besides being “difficult,” he was witty and funny, and often appreciative. Still, he was predictably unpredictable, and in time he severed his connections to Knopf and moved on to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and eventually left FSG for Viking.

You received the Carle Honor in the mentor category. Here are some names of children’s literature legends with whom you have worked. I’m going to mention their names and have you respond.

Roger Duvoisin: I met Duvoisin near the end of his life and worked on one picture book with him and an anthology of Petunia stories. This was the era when artists prepared their own color separations on acetate for four-color printing. Duvoisin is the only artist I’ve ever met who didn’t complain about this and actually liked the process. He said it reminded him of printmaking, of preparing a stone for lithography. He loved every part of the bookmaking process, and he opened my eyes to viewing it as he did.

Robert Cormier: I had just gone from freelancer to staff member at Knopf/Pantheon and was working for Fabio Coen when the manuscript for The Chocolate War (Pantheon, 1974) came in. Fabio had given it a first read and was asking each of us in the department to read it. This was 1973 and YA books weren’t what they are today. There had been many powerful and disturbing books about adolescents— e.g. Lord of the Flies—but they were published for adults before being discovered and claimed by YAs. Could he risk publishing it as a YA when it was not only dark but didn’t even have a happy ending? Would it be banned out of existence? Well, it was widely banned but certainly not out of existence. I was never Cormier’s editor but an admiring supporter and friend.

Leo Lionni: I became Lionni’s editor when Fabio Coen retired in 1979 and worked with him until his death in 1999. Leo taught me how to make picture books. He was the first of what Peter Sís calls my émigré artists, soon to be joined by Peter and much later, at FSG by Tomek Bogacki, Sergio Ruzzier, Boris Kulikov, Gabi Swiatkowska, Yangsook Choi, and Hyewon Yum. Lionni had a distinguished career as a graphic designer before the idea for a picture book came to him in a moment of desperation or inspiration when he was trying to entertain his two active grandchildren on a commuter train from Grand Central to Greenwich, Connecticut. Tearing colored shapes from the pages of a magazine—he was art director for Fortune—and using his briefcase as his stage, he held them in his spell as he told the story for Little Blue and Little Yellow (McDowell, Obolensky, 1959). This opened a well of ideas and casts of characters who play unforgettable roles in his picture book dramas.

Philip Pullman: I felt I’d hit my stride as an editor when Ruby in the Smoke (Knopf, 1985), the first in Pullman’s Sally Lockhart quartet came my way. It wasn’t because these books presented a challenge—they were pure pleasure—or that Pullman needed a lot of editing; it was because they felt like something I’d been looking for without knowing it for most of my publishing career. Philip Pullman calls them historical thrillers with old-fashioned Victorian blood and thunder. And that’s exactly what they are, grounded by a solid understanding of history and storytelling. My editing was mainly done through asking questions, educating myself as it happened, and carrying on an animated cross-Atlantic communication by letter and telephone with this very nimble thinker and amazing storyteller.

Peter Sís: Peter was actually a man without a country when I first met him, a Czech émigré who resisted his government’s order to return home from Los Angeles where he was on a film assignment in the early 1980s. This was Cold War politics, and when the chance to stay presented itself, he grabbed it. What did New York look or feel like to a struggling artist who couldn’t go home? A museum curator in Los Angeles had secretly sent samples of his work to Maurice Sendak who introduced Peter to Susan Hirschman, who gave him a David Shannon book to illustrate and after that Paul Fleishman’s The Whipping Boy (Greenwillow, 1987).

But New York City was expensive and Peter came with nothing but natural charisma, indefatigable energy and enormous talent. He needed work. Coming from a Communist country he’d expected, or maybe just hoped he would find subsidized housing for artists and a living stipend from publishers. He quickly realized that he would have to go from door to door with his portfolio and show his wares. I was one of the lucky editors he called on. I’d never seen work quite like his—visionary, beautiful, intellectually challenging—we set out to free a 32-page picture from the 92-page storyboard in his portfolio about a white rhinoceros. Rainbow Rhino (Knopf, 1987) was the first book that he wrote and illustrated.

Polly Horvath: I was a freelance reader for Margaret McElderry at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Polly Horvath was a fourteen-year-old budding novelist submitting long, messily typed, madcap manuscripts. I didn’t know she was fourteen at the time; she could have just as easily been an eccentric adult who had an out-of-control imagination, was drawn to weird characters and once she got started telling a story didn’t know when or how to stop. So I was actually relieved to learn her age. I couldn’t reject her with our form letters, even with a personal note at the end, it seemed too dismissive of her potential. I know that I wrote at least one letter to her, urging her to keep writing, and that she did, polishing her craft and gaining a measure of control without losing any of her originality.

You were the editor for the Newbery Winner Holes (Farrar, 1998) by Louis Sachar. What are you memories about working on that book?

I had already done four novels with Louis Sachar, beginning with There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom (Knopf, 1987), so I wasn’t surprised to find Holes came in in very good shape. Louis generally completed five full drafts of a novel before he shared it with anyone. I also knew that every little piece was there for a reason and in the end, it would all fit together like a puzzle. His books were fun to work on and Holes more than most. Then came the fun of publishing it to a world that rallied around it. That was a dream year for me, starting with Holes winning the National Book Award, followed by the Newbery Medal, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and every other major award in Children’s Literature. A year like that could go to one’s head, but life has ways of spreading the riches around. Sachar’s FSG competitors for the National Book Award that year were Jack Gantos for Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key (1998) and Ann Cameron for The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods (1998, both Farrar). That same year, 1999, Peter Sís won a Caldecott Honor for Tibet Through the Red Box. An embarrassment of riches that I found not even a little embarrassing.

Natalie Merchant, Barbara McClintock and Frances Foster at the Eric Carle Honor awards. Photo by Johnny Wolf.

Both Barbara McClintock and Natalie Merchant presented you with the Carle Honor and they told us about you. Tell us about them?

A. Well, their introduction was lovely but more than a little embarrassing, especially coming from two artists who are so hugely gifted. I first heard about Natalie’s album Leave Your Sleep (Farrar, 2012) in an interview she did with PBS and instantly thought it should be a picture book, too, illustrated by Barbara McClintock. A friend of Barbara’s had given her the album, and she had the same thought. It took us a while to track Natalie down, but when we did we learned that she already knew and loved Barbara’s work and that she had always intended the project to be a picture book as well as an album. They both brought a lot of passion and intelligence to this project, and together they are committed to doing whatever they can to get music and art and poetry into children’s lives.

How has children’s book publishing changed?

A. How hasn’t it changed? It’s tempting to start with technology. (I say this as I’m working on an antiquated company-issued laptop that was handed down by someone in finance. In those days, editorial got the hand-me-downs.) When I got my first publishing job, we used manual typewriters. The electric typewriter represented a big advancement and introduced more speed and efficiency. I don’t know if younger people can possibly imagine how computers and email, texting, and smartphones have affected the pace of the entire publishing process, of the world, for that matter. We editors worked only on hard copy—some of us still do, by choice; designers did everything by hand. They traced fonts and pasted up mechanicals.

Manuscripts were delivered by mail or messenger and traveled through the production process and were sent off to the printer or compositor to be manually typed or keyboarded and then set in type. Now of course, they travel as digital files. Designers do almost everything by computer, and many artists and authors do, as well. How books are bought and sold has changed, too. There were hundreds of independent bookstores across the country that specialized in children’s books. B. Dalton, our first chain arrived in the late 1960s. The books have changed, too, while also remaining the same. We still look for unforgettable stories.