Category — Non-fiction for medium-sized ones

Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, is a wonderful picture-book biography about Wilson Bentley, the man who first photographed snow crystals. It’s a wonderful story of perseverence and focus and perfectly relevant, too: even though the events in this book took place well over a hundred years ago, who doesn’t see the wonder in that first falling snowflake?

The pictures are gorgeous, and in fact, the illustrator, Mary Azarian, won a Caldecott medal for the woodcuts she uses to portray Bentley’s life. The text is pretty fantastic, too. It’s a longish book, for a picture book, but when I’ve read it to 6 and 7 year-olds they stay riveted to every word. Part of it is Martin’s wonderful, descriptive text: Bentley thought “snow was as beautiful as butterflies, or apple blossoms,” and part of it is the detailed illustration.

Snowflake” Bentley was a truly inspirational man, and even small children can recognize that his life illustrates a life with purpose and meaning, and his devotion to finding a way to photograph snow personifies the idea of keeping a dream alive.