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Outside Your Window
A First Book of Nature
By Nicola Davies
Illustrated by Mark Hearld
Candlewick, 2012
$19.99, ages 3 and up, 108 pages
A world of wonder is unfolding outside -- all through the windows of this enchanting book.
Each spread of this big-format nature book shows what a child might see, looking out of their window into the natural world:
From "a hundred fluffy parachutes" about to take flight off a dandelion to a squirrel scampering from trunk to fence with a fidgety gate and air of alertness.
Zoologist and award-winning author Nicola Davies muses about the natural world in short, playful poems, while artist Mark Hearld plays out what she describes in enchanting collages.
Hearld, who makes his debut in picture books with this gem, impresses with a voluminous display of art and creatively layered details. His collages are organic, absorbing and rich as earth.
One of his most enchanting collages, also shown in part on the cover, shows two cutouts of birds by a nest that's been built up with paint, strips of paper and real grass then set against an air-brushed sky.
Block prints of feathers are applied to the wings and the chests are painted with delicate white plumage, then each tawny bird is given beguiling eyes of altering black and rust circles.
Over spring, summer, winter and fall, the scenes in the book shift and develop, and familiar things happen:
Icicles drip from the eaves of a child's house, spiders dangle from "tiny parachutes" of string from the window frame or baby birds o
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Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.
- Proverb
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