Runaway Pond

Praise

Steeped in historical detail, Ibatoulline’s elegant, photorealistic watercolors paint rich portraits of all four seasons of pond and people in a 19th-century Vermont village. . . . There’s a gentle wholesomeness here. . . Beautiful.
—Kirkus Reviews

This piece of Americana commemorates a rural Vermont community. . . Expertly drafted Rockwellian spreads by Ibatoulline (The Hawk of the Castle) display the beauty of the pond, and the log cabins built around it, through every season.
—Publishers Weekly

The story celebrates a bygone era. . . Graff’s appended note explains that events in Vermont in 1810 inspired her story, and she separates facts from fiction. Ibatoulline gives his richly detailed, beautifully composed paintings a rustic American setting. An appealing, history-based picture book.
—Booklist

Bagram Ibatoulline is one of a handful of children’s illustrators to deal in realism, depicting people and things as they are rather than in a stylized way. This fall he brings his representational sensibility to a story that Nancy Price Graff has taken from a real-life drama in early 19th-century Vermont.
—The Wall Street Journal

Based on a true story, this lavishly illustrated and sensitively written story is ultimately about changing landscapes and how something beautiful can transform into another thing of beauty.
—The Reading Eagle