By Matthew Cordell
A girl in a red coat finds a lost wolf pup in a blizzard and carries it home to its pack, and this nearly wordless book puts your child right there in the storm with her.
A girl in a red hooded coat walks home from school as a snowstorm closes in. In the same white, howling woods, a wolf pup is separated from its pack and can't find its way back. The girl spots the shivering pup and, instead of walking on, gathers it up and carries it through deeper and deeper snow, following the far-off howls until she reaches the waiting pack and sets the pup down. But now the storm has turned on her, and she sinks down, spent and freezing, in the drifts. Then the howling swings back toward her, and the wolves, along with her own dog and her family, close in through the white. There are almost no words here, just wind and howls and barks and the crunch of snow.
This is the book that proves a nearly wordless story can carry real weight. For a child who won't read text, it delivers a full, heart-in-your-throat adventure, danger, courage, rescue, read entirely through the pictures, so they come out the other side having felt something big. The kindness at its center, a lost child helping a lost creature and then being helped in return, lands hard precisely because no words explain it. Two lost ones save each other, and that turn is what a child asks to feel again, wanting the storm and the safe ending one more time.