In the 25 years since the landmark publication of Ann Blades’ Mary of Mile 18, picture book fads and fashions have come and gone, and Blades has continued to write and paint in her own highly particular style. Her strengths as a writer (clarity, simplicity, and a fine storytelling sense) and her gifts as a painter (the use of luminous watercolour, especially in landscape, striking compositions, and a child-like pleasure in detail) combine to create stories that have the shape, rhythm, and energy of the best picture books. The story proceeds quietly along and the pictures show the moment just before something is to happen. This combination of calm and anticipation creates the dynamic tension that makes picture books so close to theatre. In her latest book, Blades is in top form.

The story opens with Mom’s announcement to her two sons that they are going to the cabin. The boys are appalled. “There’s no TV at the cabin. There’s no soccer field there. There are no video games. There’s nothing to do.” By the end of the holiday the boys don’t want to leave. “There’s no fishing at home. There’s no lake there. There’s no boat. There’s no fort. There’s nothing to do!” The transformation that takes place between these two whines involves all the summer pleasures of a cabin by the lake. There are campfires and fishing, summer thunder storms and Monopoly, a fort to build and a deck to repair. One beautifully composed picture shows the boys in mid-cannonball off the dock. A scene of the boys nailing new boards onto the dock is full of the intense concentration of a child project. Much of this is the stuff of any summertime escape to the country. For families in B.C., Blades provides the pleasures of specific references like the ritual recital of the names of the tunnels in the Fraser Canyon. This is a book for children who live there, who visit, and who have never been there at all. This is a book for bedtime, for preschool storytime, for beginning readers, for older kids to come back to, and for adults who want to remember.