cover image The River

The River

Alessandro Sanna, trans. from the Italian by Michael Reynolds. Enchanted Lion (Consortium, dist.), $22.95 (112p) ISBN 978-1-59270-149-0

Italian illustrator Sanna paints hundreds of watercolors of the country's Po River, arranging the thin, wide panoramas on the pages like photos in an album. Wordless stories, one for each season, are prefaced by passages of lyrical prose. The first, Autumn, remembers a catastrophic flood. "The old-timers speak to me of the skin of the river," Sanna writes, "as if it were a sleeping animal that might awake at any moment." Using watercolor stain on wet paper for the dark clouds and a fine brush for those who stand vigil on the banks, Sanna follows a man on a bicycle who offers help up and down the river. After a night at home with his wife, the man returns to the rescue effort. When he reappears, this time in a boat, he discovers his house empty and half-submerged. The other three stories%E2%80%94the birth of a calf in the winter, a spring wedding, a summer encounter between an artist and an escaped tiger%E2%80%94offer compensatory joy. The myriad images of the Po in rain, sun, at dusk and dawn give readers a deeper sense of its allure. Ages 6%E2%80%93up. (Feb.)