The Branch

One night during a huge thunderstorm, a girl hears a crack, then a crash. She rushes outside and sees there are ice-covered sticks everywhere, and her favorite branch, which she has played on and under, has broken from the tree. Her nextdoor neighbor asks why she’s unhappy, and she tells him about her branch. He tells her that it can become something new and asks what she is going to do with it. She whispers an idea to him, and over some time they make plans; they measure and saw, they plane and sand, and they wait and make the new thing. It wasn’t just any branch–it was her branch; and now it still is.

You will like this book because it shows you how you can turn something old or broken into something new and still be able to keep your memories of the old thing, like the girl’s branch. The pictures are hand-drawn and colored with dark colors at first because of the storm and because the girl is sad that she loses her branch, but by the end the colors are brighter and lighter because the storm and the winter are gone and the girl is happy.