Sydney Smith (6)

The first four pages are wordless, and then the bundled-up narrator begins, "I know what it's like to be small in the city. People don't see you and loud sounds can scare you, and knowing what to do is hard sometimes." The narrator makes their way through the gray winter city, thick with black outlines, tall buildings, alleys, fences, and swirling snow. The "you" they are addressing turns out to be not the reader, but a lost cat: the narrator is putting up LOST posters, and returns home to a show more mother's hug. A final wordless frame shows cat footprints in the snow - hope?

Crushing.

See also: Found by Jeff Newman and Larry Day show less

A child wanders the snowy winter city, offering advice to an unknown friend. "Alleys can be good shortcuts. But don't go down this alley. It's too dark." The child doesn't seem to have an adult with them, and the advice gives readers a lot to infer, sometimes heartbreakingly. (What past has this child endured to know these tips on survival?) We finally see posters for a lost cat, and the child returns to hug a grownup. The artwork perfectly conveys the feeling of urban overwhelm, with show more details easily overlooked but which contribute to the overall feeling. show less

Tucked in bed at a new apartment, a boy and his mother trade favorite memories. Some are idyllic, like a picnic with Dad, but others are more surprising: a fall from a bike into soft piled hay, the smell of an old oil lamp when a rainstorm blew the power out. Now it’s just the two of them, and the house where all those memories happened is far away. But maybe someday, this will be a favorite memory, too: happy and sad, an end and a beginning intertwined. In a series of warm and wistful show more vignettes, as achingly fleeting as childhood memories always become, Sydney Smith takes us into the mind of a young person processing a bevy of complex emotions during a major life change. Do You Remember? is a stirring meditation on holding fast to the best of the past, and choosing to believe in the future. show less

A young child makes her way through a busy city in this lovely picture-book from Canadian author/illustrator Sydney Smith, offering a running narrative on what it is like to be small in such a large place. Describing what is to be seen, and how it makes a small being feel, offering advice on places to avoid and places to seek out, the narrative eventually concludes as the child puts up lost cat posters in the park, before making her way home, where her worried mother greets her. A sign of show more hope, vis-a-vis the missing cat, makes up the final scene of the book...

Originally published in 2019, Small in the City is the first picture-book that Smith both wrote and illustrated, after illustrating such notable titles as JonArno Lawson's Sidewalk Flowers and Joanne Schwartz's Town Is By the Sea, which won the 2018 Kate Greenaway Medal. Smith won this year's (2021) Greenaway Medal as well, for this authorial debut, and it is not difficult to see why. The artwork here, created in ink, watercolor and a bit of gouache, really captures the emotional register of the story: feeling small and alone in a large place, feeling lost and at odds with the world while battling through a snowstorm, feeling sad and lonely and worried while missing a beloved companion. Given the melancholy feeling created by text and image, I'm glad that Smith provided that hopeful moment at the end, depicting some cat tracks in the snow outside the girl's house. I was also impressed by the storytelling pivot, as I read the beginning of the book as a child's narrative about her own experience, only to realize toward the end that the child was speaking to her lost cat, assuaging her own fear by attempting to guide the cat through all the potential dangers of being small in the city.

All in all, I found this a lovely book, and would recommend it to picture-book readers who appreciate beautiful illustrations, or somewhat melancholy tales. show less