In affectionate tribute to rural New England, his home for the past 35 years, dePaola offers four short character tales, one per season, with six even shorter tourist anecdotes interspersed: “Have you lived here your whole life?” “Not yet.” Told or retold in dialect and illustrated with landscapes of changing colors and (usually) poker-faced country folk, the stories range from a slightly tall lumber-camp romance starring Paul Bunyan’s cousin Big Gertie to a plainly autobiographical invitation to a “set”—which turns out to be a get-together with neighbors in which cider and doughnuts are consumed in total silence. Treat young readers and listeners who enjoyed Kevin Hawkes’s North Country excursion Wicked Big Toddlah (June 2007) to these further glimpses of a distinctive regional culture. (Picture book. 7-9)
