Twelve Kinds of Ice
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From the first ice, a thin skin on a bucket of water, through thickly-iced fields, streams, and gardens, a girl, her family, and friends anticipate and enjoy a winter of skating, ending with an ice show complete with costumes, refreshments, and clowns.
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Add Age SuitabilityELIZABETH RAMSEY BIRD thinks this title is suitable for between the ages of 6 and 10
Summary
Add a SummaryIn this family there are twelve kinds of ice. All the kids know this fact. “The First Ice” is that thin sheen you find in pails. “The Second Ice” can be pulled out like panes of glass. As the winter comes on, the days grow colder and colder and the kids wait in anticipation. Finally, after the appearance of “Black Ice” it’s time to turn the vegetable garden into a skating rink that will last the whole winter. The whole family creates the sides and uses the hose to create the perfect space. With crisp prose designed to make you feel excited and cozy all at once, the author goes through a full winter with this family. There are sibling rivalries for ice time, skating parties, comic routines, an ice show, and then finally those spring days where you can only skate an hour before the sun starts making puddles. Fortunately for all the kids there’s one kind of ice left and that is dream ice. The ice where you can skate everything from telephone wires to slanting roofs and it will last you all the year until the first ice comes again.
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Add a Quote"We sped to silver speeds at which lungs and legs, clouds and sun, wind and cold, race together. Our blades spit out silver. Our lungs breathed out silver. Our minds burst with silver while the winter sun danced silver down our bending backs.”
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Add a CommentA lovely little look at life where winter is the most anticipated athletic season because it brings the dreamed-of ice.
Illustrated with homey, intricately detailed black-and-white scratchboard drawings, this "perfect snowflake of a book" (New York Times Book Review) presents a nostalgic sequence of 20 vignettes depicting the different kinds of ice that form during one long winter. Poetic and artful while also filled with lots of boisterous winter activity, Twelve Kinds of Ice is a warm and memorable ode to the wonders and charms of country life. For another cosy celebration of winter, check out David Johnson's Snow Sounds. Picture books newsletter February 2013. http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Newsletters/
Winter may be pretty much over by February where we live, but somewhere there's still a few kinds of ice to come. This lovely little book would be great for a Prairie transplant missing home-made hockey rinks, or anyone with an imgination.
Loved this little book- such a gem! it's all about the anticipation of coming cold weather, so the family can have the joy of skating again. It is beautifully illustrated with detailed black and white line drawings.
The search for books that aim to become “classics” never ceases. Such books are difficult to find, partly because the ones that try to feel that way utilize this sickening faux nostalgia that, in particularly egregious examples, can make your hair curl. That’s why a book like Twelve Kinds of Ice strikes me as such a rarity. Here we have something that feels like something your grandmother might have read you, yet is as fresh and fun and original as you could hope for. Difficult to categorize, the one thing you can say about it is that it defies you to sum it up neatly. And that it’s delightful, of course. That too.