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Eaton, Maxwell, III

Looking for Peppermint, or, Life in the Forest

40 pp. | Holiday/Porter | February, 2024 | Trade ISBN 9780823452088 $18.99
(2) K-3 From a red cabin in a forest, the young protagonist calls for her dog. "Peppermint! Where is that pesky pup? I'm going out to look for Peppermint! You come too." In the panel-style illustrations that follow, the girl takes readers on a tour of her favorite features of the forest, while the cagey Peppermint comments from a circle inset on each spread. When there are reminiscences (about the time, for instance, when Peppermint came home with a snout full of porcupine quills), the action appears as childlike drawings in the girl's sketchbook (Peppermint: "Maybe not my finest hour"). A mix of the informative and the homey, the narration encompasses elements of history and geology (how millennia earlier, glaciers dropped erratic boulders), botany, zoology (the time a coyote chased them home and they later returned to find its den), and folk wisdom (how to make a whistle out of an acorn cupule), in a visually inviting and intellectually stimulating way. When the naughty Peppermint is at last reunited with her owner, they're rewarded with one of the girl's life-list ambitions: the sight of an elusive fisher regarding them silently from high in a tree. The back matter includes a note from the author about his home and a map showing the Adirondack Mountains, sidebars about porcupines and fishers, and a list of "a few good forest books."
Reviewer: Anita L. Burkam | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2024

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