Prepare to be flown away

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Dragonfly Kites

By Tomson Highway

Illustrated by Brian Deines

HarperCollins

32 pages (hc)

$19.99

Dragonflies are very much in vogue these days. Children's author Tomson Highway discovered their translucent magic long before the mysterious bugs became a hot commercial property.

An experienced time traveler, Highway has once again taken us back to a magical childhood in the wilds of northern Manitoba where he plays and dreams in Cree.

Dragonfly Kites is the second volume in his Songs Of The North Wind Trilogy.

Joe and Cody, two young brothers who faced almost certain death trapped in the middle of a herd of thundering Caribou in the first book, Caribou Song, are back with their mama and papa, little dog Ootsie, and a whole menagerie of wild friends-baby loons, terns, eaglets, chipmunks and rabbits.

In this great northern landscape, surrounded by so many lakes that the family never camped near the same one twice, day to day living has now taken on a deeper meaning for the boys.

But it is in the company of dragonflies that Cody and Joe are swept off their feet into an enchanted world of dance and dreams.

What may surprise readers who enjoyed the lush poetic sweeps of imagery in Highway's first novel, Kiss Of The Fur Queen, is how clean and spare the English reads and how well that works in the service of translation into Woodland Cree.

Rich imagery and colorful flights of imagination are reserved for the exuberant oil paintings of illustrator Brian Deines, who also plied his magic in Caribou Songs.

Deines, whose impressionistic daubing of color uses a kid's eye perspective to advantage, paints an empathetic world where sticks and stones don't break your bones. Instead they are your good friends and gentle playmates in the enchanted landscape of childhood.

Highway, who spends half the year living in southern France-think Renoir, Monet, Pissarro-and the other half living in a cabin in the fragrant woods of northern Ontario, seems to have found the perfect artistic collaborator in Deines.

Dragonfly Kites, short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Best Children's Illustration, is a gorgeous feast for the eye that captures the poetry of land, lake, river and sky.