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Laura Bannon was an artist and illustrator from Michigan who worked most of her life in the Chicago area. She wrote some of the books that she illustrated including the one reviewed here, Red Mittens.
Red Mittens starts out by Little Joe’s mother knitting him warm red mittens to keep his hands warm in the winter. He immediately tested them out while sledding in the snow. They kept his hands “warm as toast!” He loved them so much he continued to wear them in the summer around his neck. One summer day he lost them. His quest to find them again occupies most of the story. There is an element of fantasy in the story, as Little Joe talks to various animals to help him to find his lost mittens, including a hen, a cat, and a cow. Where he actually finds them makes the hen, the cat, the cow, and Little Joe laugh and laugh and laugh. This is a sweet story, perfect for early readers in elementary school. The book is also a very nice read-aloud for toddlers. I can just hear a parent imitating the animal and human voices and a little one chuckling along. The illustrations are beautiful old-fashioned pen and ink drawings with red for the yarn from which the mittens were made. Older picture books, before multi-color printing became less expensive, would sometimes use red as a highlight for the mainly black and white drawings. Bannon’s drawings contain lots of solid black, so have much more texture in them than in typical pen and ink drawings. Her style reminds me a bit of the style of James Daugherty, the famous illustrator and author of so many books from American history (his books are also worth looking for!). Plumfield Press has done a good job reproducing this very sweet public domain picture book.