By Carole Lindstrom
The Caldecott Medal winner about an Ojibwe girl who stands up to protect her people's water from a pipeline the old stories called the black snake, written and illustrated by two Native women.
A girl passes on what her grandmother taught her: water is the first medicine, it carried her before she was born, and her people are the ones meant to look after it. Her Nokomis also passed down a prophecy, of a black snake that would come to wreck the land and poison the water. Now it's here. It's a pipeline, and Goade draws it as a long black coil that spreads across the pages and drains the color out of them. So the girl stands up. She calls to her people, to the animals, to everyone who drinks water, which is all of us, and asks them to stand with her. The book ends on a pledge, with a line for your child to sign their name.
Most earth-and-environment books for children lay out a problem and hope your child will care. This one skips the lesson and pulls your child into a line of people standing in front of something, and the language and the art make standing there feel huge and beautiful instead of heavy. It lives in mood more than plot, which is what lets a six-year-old and an eleven-year-old both come away with something, at very different depths.