Gillnetter Girls

Gillnetter Girls by author/illustrator Mollie Ginther takes readers along for a summer of salmon fishing in Alaska with young Ani, Mama, and their seafaring feline, BB Cat. The picture book’s lively artwork captures details of daily adventures aboard their boat while fishing, visiting with fellow fisherfolk, and riding out storms, as well as explorations onshore as they pick berries, examine tide pools, and find treasures on the beach.

Gillnetter Girls by Mollie Ginther
Cover illustration

The text and the illustrations are as interesting as they are informational. Ginther’s drawings give her characters a feeling of energy and motion, with a variety of perspectives and unexpected details that draw the reader into each page. Illustrated insets on some pages provide extra information, such as the parts of a gillnet, or interesting details, one of my favorites being a warning pile of bear poo.

Gillnet with inset details

Several full-page pictures accurately depict specific animals or plants, such as species of salmon, seaweed and kelp, and jellyfish. The information presented throughout the book is never heavy-handed; it flows naturally from the text and art as the days roll by.

Seaweed and kelp illustrations

The text is appropriately spare for a picture book and doesn’t try to do too much. While the story is slight — a simple accumulation of small events during the summer’s fishing — because it begins and ends with a season it feels satisfyingly complete. The everyday experiences will be unique and of interest to most children and adults.

Setting out for a new season of fishing!

Ginther uses an attractive, narrow border to contain the activities of each day to their respective pages, as well as enough white space to give the illustrations plenty of fresh, open air. Text integrates clearly with the illustrations, which complement and extend the text.

Gillnetter Girls will leave readers with a new appreciation for a unique way of livelihood -- and feeling like they’ve been on a grand summer adventure!

A brief glossary is included. Of interest to ages 4 to 7. Published 2020 by Orange Hat Press.

Mary's Wild Winter Feast

An on-going challenge in Alaska is finding authentic, place-based, and culturally relevant books for children. Mary’s Wild Winter Feast by Hannah Lindoff, illustrated by Nobu Koch and Clarissa Rizul, fits that bill.

Snowy Owl Books/University of Alaska Press

In six short chapters the book introduces readers to the bond between a family and their Southeast Alaska homeland through the wild foods they gather and preserve. On a rainy winter day, when Mary questions why they live there, her father takes her to the pantry. Jars of food on the shelves — salmon, deer, seaweed, blueberries, and smoked salmon — inspire brief, one-chapter stories about how the food was harvested and preserved the previous summer. Told primarily by Mary’s father, the stories are saved from didacticism by their realistic details, genuine affection between father and daughter, and a conversational style that incorporates Mary’s comments and memories, as well as Dad’s.

The book is unusual in that it is illustrated by two artists, both from Juneau (as is Lindoff). Nobu Koch’s background in 3-D animation renders graphic-novel style illustrations that form the visual backbone for the story. Clarissa Rizul, a Tlingit artist currently living in Colorado, contributed beautiful formline collages, which Koch integrated into her artwork. Rizul’s images add a layer of depth that enrich the illustrations both culturally and artistically.

Though not explicitly stated in the story, readers presume the family is Alaska Native, based on the art and the introduction, which explains that the story reflects the author's family. Lindoff's husband is Tlingit and Haida and the author was adopted into a Tlingit clan.

Mary’s Wild Winter Feast is all about relationships — a people to their homeland, a family to their environment and traditions, a father and daughter to each other. It captures the joy of those relationships and the satisfaction of participating in the web of life through harvesting, preserving, sharing and eating wild foods. Best of all, it does that through authentic stories a child can relate to.