BIG WOLF & LITTLE WOLF, SUCH A BEAUTIFUL ORANGE!

The furry soulmates who met, separated and reunited in Big Wolf & Little Wolf (2009) suffer another temporary parting. When Little Wolf chases after a luscious orange that Big Wolf throws a little too hard and then doesn’t come back, Big Wolf once again feels pangs of loneliness. He sets out to find his small blue companion—into a city that Tallec’s crowded, blocky, shadowed street scenes render particularly soulless, impersonal and, as darkness falls, scary. Big Wolf’s feelings are subtly cued but felt with uncommon sharpness: “Big Wolf went cold. He didn’t dare to think anything. Certainly not that Little Wolf wanted to leave him, or that he would never return, or any of the other strange and unbelievable things he might think.” Little Wolf, tubby and silent throughout, is an enigmatic figure, but the much larger Big Wolf is rendered with a nose, ears and body of sinuous, exaggerated length, and the changing curves and angles of his body language clearly capture the depth and intensity of his emotions. Despite a few disconnects between the text and the pictures, even younger readers will be caught up in Big Wolf’s odyssey and rejoice when he at last tracks down his errant buddy, and (after he gently tosses him the orange) they “lived happily together for a long, long time.” (Picture book. 5-8)