Ryoji Arai’s The Snow Theater, translated from the original Japanese by David Boyd, is a swirling dream of a book, perfect for spurring imaginations over a cozy bedtime read. Two boys in a snowy mountainside village admire a book on butterflies that’s a favorite of one of their fathers. A page gets mistakenly torn, much to their horror.
After taping the page back together, one of the boys heads out into the snow for a cross-country ski, all the while lamenting the accident. As he whizzes down a steep hill, he falls into a crevasse, where he discovers an entrancing snow theater—a tiny stage filled with “snow people” performers, almost reminiscent of Nutcracker dancers.
Arai, who won the 2005 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, has a whirling, colorful style that has a delicate, evanescent quality, perfectly suited to sweeping young readers up in its icy fantasy. The boy’s big orange house provides a warm, inviting refuge amid the snow drifts, and young readers will readily identify with the page-tearing accident, a moment of childish enthusiasm that leaves the perpetrators shrouded in guilt. The boy’s escape into the snow provides an exhilarating release, his orange scarf and skis providing a bright spot to follow in the snowscapes tinted with blue and green. The child’s magical encounter with the snow performers turns his ski accident into a breathtaking fever dream, thanks to the lively, loose strokes of Arai’s trademark free-spirited art. Readers can see and practically feel the chilling embrace of the snowburst blanketing these hills, and Arai artfully introduces the butterfly theme back into the boy’s vision.
The boy’s quick rescue by his thankful, forgiving father provides the perfect ending to this snowy adventure fantasy. The Snow Theater is a singular delight, a world of wonders that sparks both understanding and awe.
