FARM LIFE

“Gray barn, gray barn, what do you house? / Nine straw-filled stalls with nine sleepy sows.” In this artful tribute to rural living, Spurr (A Pig Named Perrier, 2002, etc.) visits five increasingly well-populated barns, each a different color, before arriving at last at the white farmhouse, where “a family to love” links all the parts together into “the whole and the heart” of the farm. A farmer and two children make their rounds in Björkman’s (The Grisly Gazette, 2002, etc.) watercolor sketches, bursting joyously out of the horse barn into lush grass, slogging through mud with a feed pail, chuckling over piglets and kittens, arriving home to dinner and a cozy get-together in front of—not the TV, but a wood-burning stove. Idealized? Yes. Heartwarming? Definitely. And a natural story time companion to other barnyard visits, such as Nancy Tafuri’s This Is the Farmer (1994) or Margaret Wise Brown’s Big Red Barn (reissued 1989, illus. by Felicia Bond). (Picture book. 5-7)