From the award-winning Jessie Sima comes a charming and lovely fable about growth and change.
Twig is a snow kid, made from snowflakes, twigs, stones, a crisp orange carrot, and a very fine hat. Twig likes being Twig. But when a breeze blows away Twig’s hat, Twig wonders if without it, Twig is still Twig.
“It seemed like the only way to go back to being Twig was to keep moving forward,” Twig muses, setting off after the hat. That triggers a series of discoveries and changes—like accumulating additional snow but losing the carrot nose—that cause Twig to wonder if there is any going back.
Finally, Twig discovers a community of diverse snow people who show “all the different ways there were to be a snow person,” and Twig discovers the joy of not just being, but becoming.
Sima once again deploys spare words and soft images to tell a simple tale with a powerful message. Twig uses they/them pronouns, and it seems likely that gender identity is at least one of the things that Sima (who also uses they/them pronouns) had in mind when writing the tale. (One could also see an echo of the trans flag colors in the book’s cover, which would support this interpretation.) The story’s message, however, could very easily apply to many other forms of change, too, gently conveying not only that change is okay, but that the process of changing, not just the end result, is also a gift.
Young readers should delight in Twig’s antics along the journey, but this highly recommended title feels like the kind of book that would make a great gift for adults going through change as well, in the same way that Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go has become a popular gift for high school and college graduates.
