Dear Treefrog by Joyce Sidman

Dear Treefrog, the latest poetry picture book of Joyce Sidman, reveals beautiful glimpses of a young girl’s life who moves into a new home in a new place where she encounters a tree frog among the tangled green leaves and gets attached to him at the first glance. The illustration work by Diana Sudyka is undoubtedly stellar and will be loved by the children.

An adult reading poems of this graceful collection can relate with his/her nostalgic childhood memories. The bond between the girl and the frog is the cynosure and core of the verse and the illustrations. Pictures reflect the feeling of compassion between them and have been a great mark of emotions throughout the book.  How naturally and pictorially she describes the brief existence of the tree frog and the ambience around him utmost realistic and evocatively. The deep companionship between the young cheerful innocent girl and the tree frog gets revealed in “In Gym Today” where the girl tries to mimic him in a curled position on the ground limning the frog’s great influence upon her. In “Some Kids Came Over” the girl got worried about the tree frog when he didn’t show up himself because of the kids who “cartwheeled and trampled and scoffed” and when they left, he stops hiding and the girl was glad. Tree frogs shed their skin to reach their full length of two inches and in doing so they hide. In “The World is Wet” on a roaring thundering night the girl hopes that the tree frog must be safe depicting her caring nature while she is inside in her bed inside a blanket with her soft toy. There is a pink coloured soft toy that seems more like a cat which the girl holds with her most of the time even while sleeping portraying that she is much attached to that cat also. This poetic collection is a great work of Joyce Sidman and must be bought by every single child. The artwork becomes the soul of the book and poetry becomes the body; without each one, the book wouldn’t be able to render its true self.

                                                                                                                                                                               ---- Rochak Agarwal

AUTHOR BIO

Joyce Sidman is the author of many award-winning children’s poetry books, including the Newbery Honor-winning Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night, and two Caldecott Honor books. Her recent prose biography book, The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science, won the 2019 Robert F. Sibert Medal. She also received the NCTE Award for Excellence in Children's Poetry, in recognition of her body of work. In her home state of Minnesota, she teaches poetry writing to school children and walks through the woods with her dog Watson.