This prompts her stern grandfather to ask that Lina move in with him so he can teach her to control her powers. While making a grand entrance at the castle of her grandfather, the North Wind, she fails to successfully ride a gust of wind and crashes in front of her entire family. Lina herself is mixed race, with black hair and a tan complexion like her Asian-presenting mother’s her Groundling father appears to be a white human. This is not a typical gathering, since Lina’s maternal relatives are a royal family of Windtamers who have power over the weather and live in castles floating on clouds.
Ice princess Lina must navigate family and school in this early chapter read.
Look upon this work, ye mighty picture-book creators, and despair. With its tiny people (indeed, mostly too tiny to distinguish skin color or features) and distant views of civilization, the book brings to mind some of the best of Mitsumasa Anno’s titles, if Anno had been occasionally influenced by Blade Runner. Our world may descend into chaos on occasion, but new life is always on the horizon. Yet one is ultimately left with a sense of hope. Meticulous care is taken with every detail in Becker’s pencil, gouache, and digital paint illustrations, leading young readers to try to piece the story of these peoples, ancient, modern, and futuristic, over time. One can gauge how much time has passed not by the tree, which ages naturally over the years, but by the civilization that grows up around it, from early settlers who build along the banks to an industrial revolution, modernity, and eventual ecological collapse. For most of the book, a tree standing on a single spit of land, hugged by a river, is the focus of the story. Having established himself as a picture-book creator unafraid of taking the long view, Becker offers an oddly comforting look at how wars, floods, and humanity itself can pass in just a blink of an eye. A wordless memento mori considers our fleeting human existence in the span of a single tree’s life.
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