Small in the city

by Sydney Smith

Hardcover, 2019

Status

Available

Collection

Picture books

Publication

New York : Holiday House, [2019]

Description

A little boy offers advice to his cat, which is lost in the city, from taking shortcuts through safe alleys to finding a friend in the park.

User reviews

LibraryThing member sweetiegherkin

This is an odd little book. It appears to be about a child looking for her lost cat and giving said cat advice about staying safe in a wintery cityscape. However, there's enough vagueness that I think it would be easily lost on a child, especially on a first read. (It is really unclear until late

in the book who the "you" the narrator keeps referring to is.)

The illustrations are interesting. Some pages look almost like a comic book with their panels of images. The color palette is relatively muted to suggest a gritty city covered in snow.

This book has received some accolades already, but it was not my cup of tea.

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LibraryThing member melodyreads

What a delightful book, with a sweet surprise hidden away.

LibraryThing member katelynamy

Kids can be overwhelmed by math; they could feel like they do not know where to start. This is how this child felt in Small in the City, except it was because his city was huge and he was just a small boy. This book gives very good perspective to students; after reading, they can see that you just

have to tackle one thing at a time. I rate this book 5 stars because with so much going on in middle school it would be a good reminder to just step back and cut one tree down at a time, do not try to tackle the whole forest at once.

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LibraryThing member mxa107

The book has an amazing storyline that many students can relate. The main character is a small boy who goes through the city alone. For example, students who just moved to the U.S and children whose favorite subject is not math undergo many difficulties. After the student read this book, they will

know that they are not alone and there is someone always willing to help.

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LibraryThing member AbigailAdams26

A young child makes her way through a busy city in this lovely picture-book from Canadian author/illustrator Sydney Smith, offering a running narrative on what it is like to be small in such a large place. Describing what is to be seen, and how it makes a small being feel, offering advice on places

to avoid and places to seek out, the narrative eventually concludes as the child puts up lost cat posters in the park, before making her way home, where her worried mother greets her. A sign of hope, vis-a-vis the missing cat, makes up the final scene of the book...

Originally published in 2019, Small in the City is the first picture-book that Smith both wrote and illustrated, after illustrating such notable titles as JonArno Lawson's Sidewalk Flowers and Joanne Schwartz's Town Is By the Sea, which won the 2018 Kate Greenaway Medal. Smith won this year's (2021) Greenaway Medal as well, for this authorial debut, and it is not difficult to see why. The artwork here, created in ink, watercolor and a bit of gouache, really captures the emotional register of the story: feeling small and alone in a large place, feeling lost and at odds with the world while battling through a snowstorm, feeling sad and lonely and worried while missing a beloved companion. Given the melancholy feeling created by text and image, I'm glad that Smith provided that hopeful moment at the end, depicting some cat tracks in the snow outside the girl's house. I was also impressed by the storytelling pivot, as I read the beginning of the book as a child's narrative about her own experience, only to realize toward the end that the child was speaking to her lost cat, assuaging her own fear by attempting to guide the cat through all the potential dangers of being small in the city.

All in all, I found this a lovely book, and would recommend it to picture-book readers who appreciate beautiful illustrations, or somewhat melancholy tales.

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