HOLD MY HAND

Zolotow's brief repetitive text (presumably one little girl talking to her friend) is given the dimension it lacks by di Grazia's palpably rendered pictures of two bundled-up little girls, first seen against a drear brown landscape ("Dark black clouds and the wind sighs. . . . There is only the cold. Oh hold my hand"), then softly through a shower of fuzzy white dots ("the snowflakes cling like bits of ice to out mittens"), and at last, starkly clear against a white background when the snow has stopped ("But oh it's cold white and bright and cold. Oh hold my hand!"). This is one of Zolotow's more dewy-eyed tributes to friendship.