Snowmen All Year

Snowmen All Year by Caralyn Buehner
Illustrated by Mark Buehner
2011

     There is something heartbreaking about snowmen.  You spend hours working on making the perfect one, packing the snow just right, and decorating it. And then, a couple of days later, it has melted away; your labor of love has vanished.  What if the last one you built where magic and could stay around all year and never melt?  That's what the boy narrator wonders about in Snowmen All Year.
     Written in rhyme, the boy imagines all the things he would do and all the places he would visit with his magic snowman.  They could fly kites together, visit the zoo, enjoy the fireworks during the 4th of July, ride roller-coasters  play chess during rainy days, even dive and swim in the pool during on a sunny summer day and go trick or treating during Halloween.  As the boy sits on a snowy patch of his yard with his latest snowman creation behind him, he hopes "this snowman will be the one to stay with me all year!"  In the last page his dream seems to come true.
     Snowmen All Year is a companion book to the two previous Snowmen Books: Snowmen at Night and Snowmen at Christmas.  The illustrations are bright and colorful.  The illustrator offers a challenge on the title page: to find two ducks, a rabbit, a T-Rex, a cat, and at least one hidden snowmen in each painting. Looking for them in each page was a lot of fun.  A winter book for all season.