“A good wind-down bedtime choice for children who have decided they can’t (or won’t) sleep.” ~ School Library
“Expressive, stylized paintings offer sweeping views of the Alaskan landscape as well as details for children to enjoy. Vanasse, who lives in Alaska, explains in an appended note that near the Arctic Circle, winter brings unrelenting weeks of darkness, summer brings many nights when the sun never sets, and summer solstice is a time for celebration.” ~Booklist
WE BELIEVE you should get the books you want the WAY you want.
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At age twenty-one, Deb Vanasse was dropped by a bush pilot on a gravel runway in middle of the Alaska wilderness. No roads, no houses, no cars, no people—only a winding brown slough and tundra spread flat as prairie. She had come not for adventure but to live, an isolating but evocative experience that has inspired much of her work, including her books about writing.
Between her mountain home and a glacier-based cabin, she continues to enjoy Alaska’s wild places.
Author Deb Vanassee at Denali
Her family lived on the grounds of the state mental institution where her dad worked. The staff consisted mostly of foreign doctors, so she grew up with children from around the world, always in the shadow of the sprawling hospital and patients who walked the grounds, each more or less in his own little world. Deb lived in her own little world much of the time too. Her favorite hangout was a shed attached to her family’s barracks-style cement block house, where she’d spend hours reading and imagining story worlds.
Deb has been known to…buy way more books than she’ll ever read
Things Deb likes…chocolate, good books, an occasional movie, a good hot shower after a few days of camping, warm flannel sheets, wide open spaces, soft falling snow, her friends
She’ll never get caught…skydiving; she so doesn’t like heights
A favorite/line expression and where it’s from: “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen
Alaskans You Most Admire: Peggy Shumaker, Elizabeth Peratrovich, DeeDee Jonrowe
Favorite Alaska places: Matanuska Glacier, Kennicott Mine, the Pribilofs
For twenty years, Vanasse lived in Fairbanks, famous for summer daylight that stretches to 21 hours. Summer solstice is a big deal in Fairbanks: there’s a midnight sun baseball game, a huge costumed marathon, and a downtown festival. And of course, children get to stay up late – the inspiration for this delightful literary celebration of the solstice.We wait all winter
in the cold and dark
for summer’s sunlit nights.
At last winter fades,
and we celebrate
the longest day of the year.
