To Each His Own: Boom Snot Twitty by Doreen Cronin.

BOOM, SNOT, AND TWITTY RELAX BY THE TREE AND WAIT FOR THE DAY TO BEGIN.

"LET'S GO SOMEWHERE!" SAID BOOM.

Boom is an ebullient bear cub clearly born to move. His unlikely buddies--Snot, a thoughtful snail, and Twitty, a robin devoted to her nest and knitty things--are not so keen.

"LET'S STAY HERE," SAID TWITTY.

"LET'S WAIT," SAID SNOT.

Twitty continues crocheting away with her pink yarn, and Snot leans back on her shell and reads her book. Boom, bored with books, climbs the tree, but he's bored with the treetop view, too. Twitty temporarily tangles her yarn.  Snot sits.  Boom sighs.

But fate steps in to disturb the serene scene, as the wind suddenly rises and the tree writhes in the tempest. Boom shouts for them to jump!  Twitty advises hanging on tight. Snot observes the obvious.

"WIND!"

Suddenly the quiet scene is turned upside down.  Twitty's yarn balls blow from her basket nest and roll away, pushed by the wind.  Snot sticks to a large leaf and is carried away on the wind, right into the middle of the pond, where she calmly poles her leaf boat toward the bank. Boom finally gets his wish to go somewhere as he is blown along by the wind and rain.

"YUCK!"

But all's well that ends warmly, as the clouds roll by, the sun returns, and the three friends are soon reunited. Twitty fashions a clothesline from her yarn and hangs the book over the line to dry, and when Snot asks what they should do next, Boom's thrill-seeking seems temporarily satisfied, as he says,

"SIT STILL."

Best known for her busy, scheming barnyard critters in Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type, award-winning author Doreen Cronin takes a different tack in her latest, Boom Snot Twitty (Viking Press, 2014), a story of three atypical friends, whose lackadaisical response to a storm is mostly soothing and stoical.  Her wittily spare text gains greatly from the artistic skills of illustrator Renata Liwska, whose soft, fuzzy understated characters and rich details tell the between-the-lines story that Cronin intends. Boom's paper airplane pointed page right foreshadows the wind to follow, and Liwska slyly depicts Twitty's needlecraft first as a homey tree cozy, then as a neck warmer for the soaked and shivering Boom, and finally as a line upon which to hang Snot's book.  Liwska, noted for her trademark subtle pencil and digital artwork in Deborah Underwood's The Quiet Book and sequels (see reviews here) carries out the picture book illustrator's mission, to extend the story, perfectly with Cronin's odd trio. Cronin and Liwska are as unlikely a pair as the three friends in this book, but a pair with a quiet communication that says it all.