Booklist Review

Mary Azarian, recipient of the 1999 Caldecott Medal for the artwork in Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, works in wood. In her quiet Vermont studio, she coaxes form and feeling out of soft pine, bringing to life the beauty of the landscape she sees and imagines around her. This arresting retrospective displays 50 gorgeous, often full-page reproductions of her hand-colored woodcuts and an equal number of prints in black and white. Lilias Hart, another Vermonter, contributes the brief accompanying text, a mix of the lyrical and the concrete that stands up well to the sturdy, roughly textured pictures. Azarian's work is, perhaps, most appealing when it reflects the homey details of daily life through the year: a cornucopia of summer vegetables, children sledding down a hill, laundry flapping in the breeze. In a final chapter, decorated with more functional woodcuts, Hart introduces a bit of printmaking history and explains the process that links Azarian to artists who used block prints to decorate fabrics more than 1,500 years ago. --Stephanie Zvirin