Soft, then loud. One, then many: a grandfather, a boy, and a field turning white with geese

Every fall, migrating snow geese blanket Vermont's Dead Creek fields like fresh snow. Angela Burke Kunkel's new picture book, Snow Geese Season, illustrated by E. B. Goodale, turns that dawn spectacle into a quiet story of a boy and his grandfather — 'Pop' — waiting in the dark for the sound: soft, then loud; one, then many. Goodale travelled to Vermont twice to get the pre-dawn colours right — deep dusky blues, straw-yellow grass, one neon-orange hat. Kunkel wrote it from memory: as a child, an uncle once simply walked with her in the woods, asking nothing. Sometimes the adult a child remembers forever is the one who just stood beside them, watching the sky.