The Horn Book Magazine
September/October 1992: v68#5
Sarah Ellis
The illustrations, in colour pencils, are imaginatively composed. When the old man dies, the accompanying illustration is a close-up of the girl standing on the front porch. The floor-boards of the porch are neatly intersected by the long shadows of porch railings, creating a precise checkerboard, a comforting predictable pattern whose symmetry is disrupted by the grandfather's hat lying in an unaccustomed place. Lightburn's use of colour and texture gives the pictures a gritty, monumental quality. The people, particularly the stocky little child, stand very firmly on the earth. Each picture is a different celebration of light- light filtered through the mist of a west coast forest, mid-summer sun baking the earth, trees reflected in a window, and finally golden evening light surrounding the returning orcas. (p622)