Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews

A Picnic with Monet

A Picnic with Monet

Julie Merberg, Suzanne Bober
Nonfiction Board Book
For ages 2 and up
Chronicle Books, 2003   ISBN: 978-0811840460

Let’s go out for the day, let’s take a train out into the countryside and have a picnic in a "secret garden." Afterwards we will ride a hobby horse, read a book under a shady tree, look at the lily pond, and watch the boats sail by in the bay.

Through the magical paintings chosen to illustrate this remarkable little board book we can make this journey through the art of Claude Monet. We can explore his world, his France, and we can marvel at how vivid and alive his work is. The authors wonderfully lyrical and rhyming text carries us on the journey with its bouncing, floating, and calming rhythms which convey us away and out on our adventures and then back, at the end of the day, "as sunshine fades to purple gray."

This is one of a superb series of board books which highlight the lives of the Impressionist painters.