TWELVE KINDS OF ICE
Houghton Mifflin 2012
Written by Ellen Bryan Obed
Illustrated by Barbara McClintock
With the first ice - a skim on a sheep pail so thin it breaks when touched - one family's winter begins in earnest. Next comes ice like panes of glass. And eventually, skating ice! Take a literary skate over field ice and streambed, through sleeping orchards and beyond. The first ice, the second ice, the third ice…perfect ice…the last ice… Twelve kinds of ice are carved into twenty nostalgic vignettes, illustrated in elegantly penned detail by the award-winning Barbara McClintock.
*Junior Library Guild Selection
*School Library Journal's 100 Magnificent Children's Books of 2012
*New York Public Library's 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing
*Booklist Editors' Choice: Books for Youth, 2012
*Booklist's Notable Children's Books: 2013
*CCBC Choices list for 2013
*Starred reviews in Kirkus, Booklist, Shelf Awareness and Publishers'
Weekly
*Winter 2012-13 Kids' Indie Next List Picks
*BookPage Best of 2012 list
"Irresistible." — Starred, Kirkus
"Everything about this small book is precise. Twenty short chapters introduce the different kinds of ice that take one family through the winter, while McClintock’s pen-and-ink drawings, subtle yet celebratory, capture ice in all its incarnations. The first ice, you see, is a skim so thin it breaks when the children touch it. Second ice is like glass. But third ice doesn’t break. The narrator and her sister hear it coming: “We lay in our beds, listening to the cold cracking the maple limbs in the yard.” Field ice arrives as a narrow strip. Then stream ice, when you can watch fish swim beneath the surface. Black ice is a little scarier, but it’s good for skating. After the first snowfall, skating can be done at home on garden ice, made by packing the snow and turning on the hose. So it goes throughout the winter, as the family garden becomes a neighborhood hockey rink. When it’s perfect, it’s time for a skating party. Finally, the ice is gone. Lost mittens and pucks appear. But dream ice still exists—and you can skate on it no matter what the season. Evocative and at the same time marvelously real, this is as much about expectation and the warmth to be found in family and friends as it is about cold ice. Children who don’t live in a cold climate will wish they did, and everyone will find this a small gem."— Starred, Booklist
"There was this overwhelming sense of a huge loveable community,
and that intrigued me to my core. Twelve Kinds of Ice taps into that
same sense and feeling, and illustrator Barbara McClintock could certainly
be seen as the second coming of Tudor sans the whole living like it’s
the 19th century thing. Never adequately recognized as the genius she
is, here her black and white pen and inks run rampant over the pages.
Sometimes serving as spot illustrations, as humorous asides (as when
the dad does his clown routine on the ice), and sometimes as glorious
fantasy spreads over two pages, she consistently wows. I also enjoyed
the fact that though the pictures seem timeless in a sense, they’re still
contemporary (one girl sports a hoodie in the “locker room”, etc)." -
School Library Journal
"Like a souvenir from a bygone era, this homage to rural winter
celebrates the gradual freezing of barn buckets and fields, the happy
heights of ice-skating season, and the inevitable spring thaw. Obed (Who
Would Like a Christmas Tree?) crafts an autobiographical first-person
narrative of a farm family and lists her dozen crystalline varieties
in ascending order. “First Ice” glazes “the sheep pails in the barn”;
a second heftier ice lifts “like panes of glass.... in our mittened hands”;
another ice, thicker still, heralds after-school skating. Short-lived
pleasures, like sinister see-through “black ice” on Maine’s Great Pond,
give way to homespun fun on a DIY rink built on the vegetable patch.
McClintock (A Child’s Garden of Verses) sets cozy mid–20th century scenes
with her crosshatched pen-and-ink illustrations; children, bundled in
woolly layers, imagine themselves Olympic figure skaters and twirl to
the sound of “John Philip Sousa marches, Strauss waltzes, Rodgers and
Hammerstein musicals.” This quaint volume could have been written 60
years ago, alongside One Morning in Maine and The Little Island. Today’s
readers will marvel at the old-fashioned amusements, chronicled with
folksy charm." — Starred, Publishers' Weekly
"In this joyous set of prose poems we follow a family through a
winter, from first ice to black ice (“water shocked still by the cold
before the snow”) and from field ice to dream ice, enjoying, along the
way, ice plucked from the top of a bucket (“we had seen it coming in
the close, round moon”), a homemade hockey rink, a goofy dad’s ice capades,
and the exhilaration of speed (“our blades spit out silver).” In Obed’s
lilting words and McClintock’s energetic yet cozy line drawings, reminiscent
of Erik Blegvad, we meet the Bryan family, the neighbors, and the college
students who drop in to skate and roast marshmallows. This is a celebration
of play, of winter, and of imagination (“We looked beneath the ice and
saw what we could not see in summer—boulders and cracks between boulders,
black shadows and sunken tree branches. And we saw what was not there—the
sullen backs and open jaws of hibernating monsters rising up from the
lake bottom”) in an icy collection whose overarching quality is warmth." -
Horn Book
"Twelve Kinds of Ice" is an exquisite little book for 6- to
10-year-olds and their parents. Snug and elegant, evocative and fun,
Ellen Bryan Obed's memoir from her childhood winters in Maine skates
along in an aesthetic pas de deux, as you might say, with Barbara McClintock's
graceful black-and-white drawings.
Ms. Obed begins by remembering the first ice of the winter, which "came
on the sheep pails in the barn—a skim of ice so thin that it broke when
we touched it." Second ice is thicker, "like panes of glass." Third
ice doesn't break: "We hit it with the heels of our boots. . . .
But the ice stayed firm."
The thickening of the ice leads to the
great seasonal joy for the Bryan children. Each year their father built
an outdoor rink, carefully watering it nightly. "And when Bryan
Gardens was ready, the whole neighborhood knew," we read. "The
school bus passed our place going up the hill so everyone could see the
ice's glassy surface shining in the sun." Figure
skaters and hockey players jostled for ice time; there was the thrill
of an ice show and the agony of surprise thaws. With spring came the
last ice of all: dream ice, which never melts. Ms. McClintock leaves
us visualizing this dreamy stuff, with girls skating arabesques along
telephone wires and boys playing hockey in the clouds." —WSJ
Nostalgia is explicit, and specific, in Ellen Bryan Obed’s perfect snowflake
of a book, “Twelve Kinds of Ice.” Truth be told, it is unclear exactly
what kind of child would find the book entrancing: sophisticated enough
for good readers, it is sparsely, if deftly, illustrated and has no vampires
or brand names or even a dramatic plot to suck someone in. But it is
nonetheless an ingeniously crafted memoir of Obed’s dreamy childhood
in Maine, built around the 12 kinds of ice that served as successive
signposts of the advancing season. It starts with the first ice that
“came on the sheep pails in the barn — a skim of ice so thin that it
broke when we touched it.” And it takes readers through various delights
as December turns to January and February.
Even more powerful than Obed’s evocations of the thrills of physical
sport are her swift, indirect characterizations of her family, who worked
hard to transform what was usually the vegetable garden into a skating
rink, making them neighborhood stars. Obed’s father not only let all
the local children put on an ice show in his rink, piping John Philip
Sousa through the house windows, but provided the entertainment, skating
around with a lemon pie that ended up making contact with Grandpa’s face.
This is a book about a young woman’s deep connection to nature and her
family, but also the thrilling reward of pitching in together to create
something magical. Barbara McClintock’s engraving-like illustrations,
all black and white, capture New England’s austerity and beauty in winter,
and the swirling lines of skaters in motion." — New York Times
"This is a short (just 64 pages) and beautiful book that tells the story of one winter’s worth of ice. It starts with the thin ice that forms on a pail of water during the first freeze and continues with the ice that is perfect for a skating party. Even when winter draws to a close and what’s left of the ice are the thawed-out mittens, you know that some ice always remains: the ice of your memories. This book will have you hoping for a pair of skates under the tree and chilly days this winter." — The Washington Post
"The rituals and humor connected with a timeless childhood experience
unspool seemingly without effort from author and artist in this intimate
volume.
A book for the entire family, Twelve Kinds of Ice may be read in one
sitting and returned to again and again. Ellen Bryan Obed, who grew up
(and still resides) in Maine, describes the harbingers of winter's great
gift: ice strong enough to hold a community of figure skaters and hockey
players, at a rink they call Bryan Gardens. "The first ice came
on the sheep pails in the barn--a skim of ice so thin that it broke when
we touched it," she writes, as Barbara McClintock portrays a toddler
breaking the pail's surface. Other meditations capture the wonderment
of transformation: "Stream ice," at the spot where the Bryan
family fished for trout in the spring; and "what was our vegetable
garden in summer became our skating rink in winter" ("Garden
ice"), a 100' x 50' magnet for skaters near and far.
The author introduces a breathtaking two-page vista of the Great Pond,
half an hour away, as the children speed the length of the lake on "a
day of black ice and silver"; McClintock draws the children on their
silver blades amid the majesty of the surrounding shoreline, boulders
and coves. It's an homage to the simple pleasures, accompanied only by
sounds of laughter, skates piercing the ice and the occasional tussle
over whether it's time for pucks or spirals." — Shelf Awareness