Jane Chelsea Aragon

An online friend recently recommended Jane Chelsea Aragon's Salt Hands, another picture book featuring the interaction between humans and deer, and having found it deeply satisfying - on both a visual and narrative level - I immediately sought out other books by the author.

Winter Harvest was the only other of Aragon's titles I could find at my public library. Published the year before Salt Hands, it features a young girl who, together with her father, feeds a family of deer during the hard winter months. The simple narrative, when paired with Leslie Baker's beautiful watercolor illustrations, makes for a lovely, quiet bedtime story. The cool winter scenes have a luminous quality that communicates the shadowy mystery of nighttime in the woods, just as the warmer indoor scenes convey a sense of security and family love. Recommended to anyone who likes animal-story picture books, or who enjoyed Salt Hands.… (meer)

The human longing for a sense of connection to nature and to our animal cousins is poignantly evoked by Jane Chelsea Aragon's simple story of a young girl who awakens one night to discover a majestic deer in her yard. Filling her hands with salt and singing a soft song, she waits... She waits for him to accept her gift.

The author's spare prose (shorter than this review), demonstrates the skill of a talented picture book author, who knows how to tell a story with the minimum number of words. The gentle illustrations by Ted Rand amplify the power of the story, its dreamlike quality, its sense of breathless wonder. The head-on picture of the deer, found toward the end of the book, is especially powerful. Thank you Lisa, for bringing this to my attention!… (meer)