Lit Du Nord: Minnesota Books and Authors

By Nick Healy

Head Up North in Picture Books

“One Summer Up North,” a new picture book from illustrator John Owens, captures some essentials of a wilderness journey in the northwoods of Minnesota.

Early on, a kid hunches with fatigue while following the parents on a long portage. Soon the family gathers under a tarp and watches a rainstorm over a large, empty lake. Later they pick wild berries on a hillside, and after night falls and the sky clears, they sit at the rocky shore and stare up at a blue-black sky smeared with stars.

All of this occurs without a word of text. Owens uses 15 two-page illustrations to track a family of three — mother, father and child — on a paddling trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Owens’ art is bright, vivid and sweet, and in each scene there is more going on than first meets the eye.

That is, generally speaking, the only way a wordless picture book can be effective. There needs to be a clear and trackable surface story (in this case, the key events of a child's first canoe trip in the Boundary Waters), and beneath that, there must be layers of detail in the art and in the characters’ emotions and experiences. Those layers are what make a wordless story fun for parents and kids to revisit, reexamine and reinterpret.

In Owens’ book, readers might go back and search for wildlife in each scene. They might spot an owl watching as the family huddles during the rainfall, and surely they’ll see some beavers bobbing up as the family paddles by.

And there’s much more to seek out. They might also track the kid in the story from initial wariness to weariness and onward to excitement and delight — and, eventually, to wonder.

Owens’ book, published in 2020, is one of a handful of recent children’s books that explore and explain aspects of the landscape, life and history in the North Country. Several of them are worth tracking down, regardless of whether you have kids around the house.

“The Lost Forest” tells the true story of a stand of virgin red pines and white pines known as The Lost Forty. The book, written by Phyllis Root and illustrated by Betsy Bowen, both of whom are longtime favorites in the Minnesota children’s literature community, begins with this question: “How do you lose a forest?”

Root manages to keep things interesting and light while providing a kid-friendly nuts-andbolts explanation of how westward expansion worked on a practical level and how land was measured, marked and diced up for sale.

That level of detail is necessary to answer the question Root begins with. How was a forest lost? Through a surveying error, she explains. In 1882, a surveying crew in northern Minnesota made a rather large mistake. They drew a map that misplaced a lake. Their map showed a lake covering a large piece of forestland. Because of that mistake, the land was never sold off for logging. The trees were spared.

That’s why, as Root puts it, “you can try to wrap your arms around a white pine tree that is 350 years old” if you visit The Lost Forty, a remaining stand of old-growth pines Up North.

“On the Shortest Day” by Laura Sulentich Fredrickson provides a visit to the Northwoods as the winter solstice arrives. The story follows a child and grandparent on a trek through the woods as daylight fades and the longest night of the year falls.

The prose in this book is bright and lyrical, and the illustrations by Laurie Caple are captivating. Caple captures the twilight with gray trees, purple hillsides and the pink horizon, and she has a particular flare depicting birds in wintertime. Watch for the pileated woodpeckers and the snowy owl.

When it comes to birds in the North, none is more important to Minnesotans than the common loon. In “Secrets of the Loon,” author Laura Purdie Salas and photographer Chuck Dayton team up to chronicle the life of Moon Loon as she grows under her parents’ watch. The use of photos rather than illustrations gives the book an engaging hook, and Dayton’s skill brings readers in close to watch a young loon grow and change.

In time, Salas writes, “Wind whistles Moon’s wings. She is almost full-grown! Soon her parents leave Moon and her brother all alone.” When autumn arrives, Moon’s next great adventure begins.