Waiting for Snow

by Marsha Diane Arnold

Illustrated by Renata Liwska

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

978-0-544-41687-1

32 pp.

Ages 3-6

November 2016

Polish-born Calgary artist Renata Liwska may be the author-illustrator of her own picture books including the Governor General Award-nominated Red Wagon (Philomel Books, 2013) and Little Panda (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), but she is best known for providing artwork for award-winning American writers such as Deborah Underwood (The Quiet Book, The Loud Book), Doreen Cronin (Boom Snot Twitty and Boom Snot Twitty This Way That Way), and Nina Laden (Once Upon a Memory).  In Waiting for Snow, Renata Liwska again provides the distinct landscape of art that takes Marsha Diane Arnold's words from story to showpiece.

From Waiting for Snow

by Marsha Diane Arnold 

illus. by Renata Liwska

Badger is desperate for snow to come.  He studies the sky, bangs pots and pans to wake it up, and follows his friends’ advice.  Rabbit recommends punching holes in the clouds with pebbles to allow the flakes to fall.  Vole suggests a snow dance. Possum proposes Badger wear his pajamas backwards.  His friends even use sugar to simulate snow when the winter flakes don’t appear.  But, just as Hedgehog in his cryptic way advises, the snow does come when it is time.

From Waiting for Snow 

by Marsha Diane Arnold 

illus. by Renata Liwska

Renata Liwska's pencil drawings coloured digitally effuse the story of childlike desperation with a tenderness and softness that materialize the animals from two-dimensional to stuffie.  Though you know that the fur of badgers and opossums may be more coarse in reality, Renata Liwska makes all her characters appear downy.  And her landscapes from outdoors to bedrooms and classrooms, both in daytime and night, are similarly relaxed and serene.  Waiting for Snow is for anyone who has ever waited for something or someone to come and been told that it will only happen in its own time.  It’s the old saying of a “watched pot never boils” acknowledging time as the truest measure of when something will happen.  No matter how much you crave it or are determined to make it happen, with snow dances or rituals or superstitions, time will be the determinant.