STRAIGHT TO THE POLE

A muffled figure leans into the wind, struggling through drifts and swirls of snow, falling forward to crawl on hands and knees to reach The Pole at last . . . no, not that sort of Pole: the kind with a sign on top. And what does that sign read? O’Malley keeps mum until two friends come out of the mists to the rescue, with news that school’s been cancelled. In the last picture, an abandoned backpack rests beneath a “Bus Stop.” A short but suitably melodramatic text—“Can’t go on. CAN’T . . . GO . . . on. (I told Mom this would happen)”—accompanies this epic journey, captured in a succession of rolling, full-bleed, zero-visibility scenes. Never has the daily venture to school been so fraught—if only in the venturer’s mind—than in this natural companion for Patricia Lakin’s hilarious Snow Day (2002), which puts a very different twist on a similar scenario. (Picture book. 6-8)