Canoe Days

“The sun is on my back like a golden friend on this perfect day.”

As the title announces, this is a picture book about a brief period in time, not even a day, really. Beautifully illustrated by Paulsen’s artist wife in an array of greens and blues, it appears to be a personal account of the author’s observations of the creatures on the periphery of a Minnesota lake. As he paddles his canoe about, he not only observes animals on the shore line—red-winged blackbirds, monarch butterflies, herons, a doe and her fawn, a fox, raccoon, frogs, and a snake—but also creatures on the lake’s still surface (a mallard hen and her ducklings “spread out like a spotted fan around her”) and in its depths—sunfish and “the cold slash show more of a hunting northern pike” moving “like an arrow through the [lily] pads.”

Paulsen’s prose is beautiful and poetic. The water, he tells us is “so quiet it becomes part of the sky”. He is part of the unity of elements, gliding through the “airwater,” moving peacefully on the “skylake.”

Ruth Wright Paulsen’s paintings are all double spreads, creating a sense of openness, spaciousness, limitlessness.

The only thing that puzzles me is Paulsen’s conclusion, in which he reviews some of the wildlife he’s observed. He mentions a badger, but there’s no badger here that I could detect, and I wonder how an editor could have missed that the word should’ve been “raccoon”.

Other than this, Canoe Days, though not my preferred type of picture book—because it lacks a plot, is a lovely enough text for its kind. show less

Yes, that's pretty much what I experienced, growing up in rural NW Wisconsin. One thing, though, to have made it feel more real to me the illustrator should have admitted that we pretty much know what's underwater by hearsay and deduction. Glare off the surface of the water means we spend a lot of time looking at clouds, hawks, contrails, and trees on the banks, too. I'm not sure how much children would enjoy this unless they have access to a quiet forested lake.

This book has really nice illustrations and is a really peaceful book to read. Although nothing is really happening in the book, it still is really good. I wouldn't really read this book to children because they may not enjoy it as much.