Awards

• Minnesota Book Award

• IRA CBC Children's Choice Award

• Crayola Kids Best Book of the Year

• Flying Starts, Publisher's Weekly 1996

Reviews

 “…Stringer’s acrylic paintings give large scale to objects such as oak leaves that require nearly a full page to be expressed. The artist makes a pair of grimy feet jump for joy and feel good to be alive. A lyrical celebration of the cycle of the seasons.” 
-School Library Journal (starred)

"The unjustly neglected subject of “gooey, gloppy, mucky, magnificent mud” requires a unique perspective to transform it from the mundane to the celebrated. That perspective is right here, especially in newcomer Stringer’s inspired artwork... Wallow in it. " 
-Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"...Stringer, in her auspicious picture book debut, portrays a solitary child viewing the brown leaves that “loosen/from their frozen drifts and run/rattling in the flapping wind,” then playing in a gigantic mud puddle...The bold acrylic paintings burst from their full-bleed spreads like tulips, with skewed perspectives and scalloped, abstract designs representing the grass and clouds. "
-Pubisher’s Weekly (starred)

"With a mere 116 words, Ray captures the anticipation and excitement winter's captives feel as spring approaches…Stringer feels this text and evokes its feeling visually. End papers are mud-brown in front and new-leaf-green in back. Until the child springs up and becomes airborne at the end, most of the acrylic pictures are down in the dirt, all rounded shapes of mud balls, toes and heels and pudgy legs. The scale is large, with a bare foot crowding a page, a strategy that draws the reader intimately into the fun. When joy breaks out and becomes too much, the type conforms to curves in the illustrations. That Stringer is a sculptor as well as a painter is no surprise." 
-Jane Resh Thomas, Minneapolis Star Tribune