Dress Warmly! Otto Goes North by Ulrika Kestere

There's a blueberry blue house with a grass roof by the sea, way, way up north. Beside the blue house is a little red sauna hut, which can be very handy in the far north. And that's where a little lynx named Lisa and a little bear named Nils live together.

One day Lisa was on the roof, mowing the grass. Nils was setting out afternoon tea in in the garden. They wanted everything to be nice for their friend Otto, a lemur, who was coming to visit.

His bike was red with a large shiny bell. Otto would ring it like mad, enough to be annoying

"Pling, Pling, Pling! Here I am!" he called.

As the three enjoy their tea, Otto tells his old friends of his plan.

"This evening I'll see the Northern Lights at last," said Otto.
I'll paint them so I can hang the picture on my wall at home!"

But there's a problem with the plan. Northern Lights only appear at night, and after nightfall, it grows quite too cold for Otto to work. His teeth chatter and he shivers all over.

He shook so hard he could not hold his brush!

Lisa and Nils rush Otto into their sauna, where he warms right up, but seems to be catching a cold. What to do?

But Otto's hosts have an idea. They decide to make Otto a really warm sweater--if they can figure out how to do that! Lisa remembers a book she has about how to spin wool into yarn and knit a woolen sweater. But first they need some wool--and there are no sheep on their island.

But wait! Wool is just sheep fur, and being a lynx and a bear, Lisa and Nils have thick fur, too. Following the book's directions, they brush and card and spin their fur on their neighbor Lena's spinning wheel into a quantity of yarn, which they dye blueberry blue, onion-skin yellow, and red cabbage red. By the time they are done with the knitting, Otto has recovered from his cold and wearing his snug sweater, he is busy doing two paintings, one for himself, and one for Lisa and Nils' house.

Ulrika Kestere's Otto Goes North (Gecko Press, 2019) is a lovely and quaint story set in a chilly Scandinavian scene in a charming faux naif style of illustrations very appealing to young readers, one which also offers an introduction to spinning and knitting. Says School Library Journal, "A perfect story to pair with a lesson on fiber art or dyeing."  For more, share this one with Caldecott artist Tomie de Paola's delightful and detailed account of the process of making a woolen cloak, Charlie Needs a Cloak.

The Sky Is All One Piece: Spark by Sarah Beth Durst

Mina had always been quiet.

She'd been born without a cry on a peaceful night when the stars over their family farm sparkled brighter than usual, or so her mother liked to say.

With calm, capable farmer parents, sandwiched between her affectionately playful older brother and the ebullient toddler twins, Mina is happy to listen quietly to the happy talk around her--until one morning she has something important to say:

"I think my egg is going to hatch soon."

Only one in four children in the land are give weather-beast eggs at the age of twelve, with a charge to nurture them until they are mature enough to go to the school where together they train for duties controlling natural energy for the utopian land of Alorria. There are sun beasts and rain beasts and wind beasts who maintain perfect temperature, breezes, and perfect rainfall for perfect crops for their land, but only a few of those beasts are storm beasts, who with their child guardians astride them, fly into storms to gather the electricity that provides the energy source for the entire land. But when her egg hatches into an energetic scale-sparking storm beast, Mina fears that she and Pixit must be mistakenly mismatched.

But Mina loves her beast and goes bravely off with Pixit for their training at Mytris Lightning School. She is overwhelmed by her daredevil roommate Jyx and their adventurous classmates Ferro and Zek, and most of her conversations are the silent mind-to-mind kind she shares with Pixit, who loyally helps her hide her inability to collect lightning for Alorria's power grid. But when the novice students are sent out to intercept a giant electrical storm on the boundary of their land, Mina and Pixit are lost from the others over the mountain peaks and fall from the sky into the forbidden land beyond Alorria's border.

Hurt and terrified, Mina and Pixit are rescued and cared for in a family outpost of the borderland people whom they have been taught to fear. And what they tell Mina reveals that the perfection of Alorria exists at the expense of those surviving outside their perfect world, and Mina realizes that she must find her true voice and speak what she has learned to her own people--and soon!

"All weather is connected and the sky is all one piece."

Sarah Beth Durst's forthcoming Spark (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2019) chronicles Mina's coming of age as she learns that her utopian Alorria is actually a dystopian state maintained at the expense of the rest of their planet. Young readers familiar with the Harry Potter canon will recognize the parallels of both the boarding school setting and the premise of the battle between good and evil in this well-imagined other-worldly fantasy with a real world sense of the responsibility to speak truth to power. Mina's own spark of courage and sense for environmental justice makes her a most appealing realistic heroine in this inventive new fantasy novel.