Book Description
for A Stone Sat Still by Brendan Wenzel
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
The author/illustrator again examines perspective and point of view, this time in a picture book in which the descriptors for a single stone vary depending on the stone’s relationship to another element of nature. In the sun’s shadow, the stone is dark to a mouse; in the moon’s glow, it is light to an owl. It’s rough to a slug with its slime trail, smooth to a prickly looking porcupine. With the changing seasons it shifts from green (surrounded by summer foliage), to red (covered by autumn leaves), to purple (in hazy fog) and blue (in winter light). The concepts vary from concrete to abstract (“And the stone was a blink and the stone was an age.”) in a work that encompasses the passage of time, with the stone eventually covered by a large body of water. Mixed-media illustrations convey a sense of the stone’s solid presence, of playfulness, of moodiness, and of mystery in a work, like the earlier They All Saw a Cat, that invites children to contemplate, conjecture, and discuss. (Ages 4–8)
CCBC Choices 2020. © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2020. Used with permission.