The Quiet Music of Gently Falling Snow

Gr 7 Up—Music, snow, and well-dressed fairies figure prominently in the dozen sumptuous paintings in this oversize volume of original tales. Morris painted the scenes, one each year, as elegant Christmas cards on commission as part of a fund-raiser for England's Help Musicians UK charity. Her wintry scenes, enlarged here and positioned above the text, are fairy-tale vignettes filled with fanciful figures and structures large and small. Fay musicians ride on bears, tigers, and other animals and sometimes travel in clever carriages or air vehicles. Morris describes the newly invented stories as "a series of lullabies for grown-ups," and it does seem unlikely that children would enter into them. They're dreamy and romantic, lyrical, and also elusive in recounting the arrival of unnamed folks by sea where "there had been no music heard in the land for centuries." It takes patient reading through poetic, often vague but also imaginative tales to grasp events, characters, and shifts of sequence in the tales of loss and love and quest to restore the music.