Wee Sister Strange

August 1, 2017

PreS-Gr 2-This lyrical poem about a girl who roams the woods at night has a more unsettling premise than readers might think at first glance. "She doesn't have parents./No one knows her name./But the people in town/Call her Wee Sister Strange." Grant's Edgar Allan Poe-ish tale is balanced by Campbell's soft illustrations in watercolor and colored pencil, which depict a fey redheaded sprite with huge hazel eyes, pert coral lips, and a ratty yellow dress, who prances through the night searching delicately for a bedtime story. The settings shift from an autumnal forest with prowling wolves and barn owls to a deep bog filled with axolotls. Kids will be intrigued by this lightly creepy rhyme, which sounds like cautionary verse but ends sweetly. The verse rolls smoothly without forced rhymes or syllables and does well as a read-aloud. VERDICT A daintily spooky bedtime story that will delight; first purchase.-Lisa Nowlain, Nevada County Community Library, CA

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Starred review from June 15, 2017
A young woodland child is on the hunt for a bedtime story in Grant and Campbell's debut collaboration. "They say there's a girl / Who lives by the woods / In a crooked old house / With no garden but gloom." So begins the tale of the small, pale-skinned, nymphlike girl named Wee Sister Strange who wanders the woods at night. She calls to owls, rides on the back of a bear, climbs to the tops of the trees, and dives to the bottom of a bog. But it is not until she comes to "a snug little house / With one window aglow" that Wee Sister Strange finds what she has been searching for--a bedtime story. Inside the house, tucked into bed, is another young child with dark hair and brown skin, whose mother is reading a familiar-looking picture book as the text proclaims, "And there's you in your bed / With this book 'neath your nose!" Campbell's illustrations give Sister's nighttime world shape and depth with emphatic splashes of light, while Grant's deployment of verse draws readers further and further in until, with a quiet metafictive twist, they find themselves reflected in both text and illustrations, gracefully aligned with the sleepy young reader of color in the book. An enchanting bedtime tale to be read over and over again. (Picture book. 3-7)

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Starred review from July 10, 2017
A young forest spirit known as Wee Sister Strange travels through a forest by night, climbing to the tops of trees and diving to the bottom of bogs in search of something not revealed until the final pages. Grant (the League of Beastly Dreadfuls series) creates a poem rich with metaphor (“She drinks up the moon/ Like a cat drinking cream./ She drinks up the dark/ Like it’s tea with the queen”) in a story that walks a careful line between eeriness and comfort. Barefoot and clad in a yellow shift dress and crown of autumn leaves, Wee Sister Strange is an unthreatening presence, utterly at home in the woods “where no children dare roam.” In moody watercolor and pencil scenes, Campbell (Who Wants a Tortoise?) uses unexpected angles to follow the sprite’s nocturnal search from multiple perspectives. The metafictive conclusion (Wee Sister Strange is lulled to sleep listening to her own story being read aloud as another girl’s bedtime story) brings the tale full circle in the loveliest of ways. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Brianne Johnson, Writers House. Illustrator’s agent: Lori Nowicki, Painted Words.