Background and Description
About a third of my books for children tend to focus on farm life. Although I didn't grow up on a working farm, I did grow up in a small cattle town in southern Texas where nature was at my fingertips. A good day was a day spent with friends exploring the dense woods and open cow pastures nearby. Storm comes out of these childhood experiences. Although we lived in Texas during one of the state's longest droughts, when it did rain it rained and thundered quite hard. It's the rhythm of the rain and the sound of the thunder that I tried to capture in this story.
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Reviews
Two children watch as a storm descends suddenly on a summer afternoon, then swirls away as quickly as it came. This quietly effective prose poem evokes the sights and sounds of the gathering gale, captures the children's excitement and a slight frisson of danger at the potential destruction...The precise, delicately phrased observations are well served by Hays's veiled artwork, which seems to glow from within. —Publishers Weekly
A storm coming in from the hills is portrayed with beauty and strength in a series of images culminating in more poem than story. A family looks on as the clouds roll over their fields, and their watchful reverence is striking in both text and illustration. Cows in the wet pasture, birds huddled in their nest, and newly planted seed absorbing the rain are all viewed by the children and their father from the barn and farmhouse windows. This creates an intensity and an immediacy uncommon in picture books, particularly those that share this one's simplicity...Children who aren't used to reacting to nature with their whole hearts will be introduced to a new perspective through this book. —School Library Journal
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Ordering Information
Title: Storm
Author: W. Nikola-Lisa
Illustrator: Michael Hays
Publisher: Atheneum
Release Date: February 1993
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
Age Levels: 4-8
Page Count: 32
available in reinforced library binding:
ISBN: 978-0689317-0-4
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