Sally Goes to the Mountains

Huneck's bright, humorous woodcut prints capture the small but lasting moments that fill a child's world.

Sally, a black Labrador retriever, is on her way to go camping in the mountains.

Stephen Huneck, creator of the New York Times bestseller Sally Goes to the Beach, now takes readers on another romp with the fun-loving black Labrador. This time Sally goes for a ride to the mountains, where there will be all kinds of new friends to meet: bears, moose, rabbits, and skunks! There will be berries to pick, sticks to fetch, and a lake to swim in. Sally can hardly wait!

Huneck's bright, humorous woodcut prints capture the small but lasting moments that fill a child's world.

Virginia Schaefer Carroll - The Five Owls

Anyone who has ever imagined or actually spoken aloud the inner dialogue of his or her pets and who hasn't done this! will enjoy sharing this oversized picture book with children. In Sally Goes to the Mountains, Vermont artist and animal lover Stephen Huneck merges ideas from two of his award-winning books about his own black Labrador, Sally: the interior canine landscape mapped out comically in My Dog's Brain (Penguin Studio, 1997) and the adventure-dog story of Sally Goes to the Beach (Abrams, 2000). The result is a dog's-eye view of the mountain world Sally has only heard about in books, a multicolored glimpse of the scenes that probably have her paws running in the air as she sprawls, sleeping, in the back of the van. From the moment one opens the cover to see dozens of woodcut prints of Sally and a rabbit in an eternal chase, Huneck shows the energy, curiosity, and humor of his protagonist. The dedication, "to dogs everywhere and the children who love them," is set above an impossibly posed Sally walking up the side of a tree. One barely sees the human being who holds a book of wild animals in front of Sally on the first double-page spread: her intense eyes and hanging tongue seem thirsty to learn about the animals she expects to meet on the family's camping trip. Even the back of this dog's head tells a story, as one sees Sally gazing at a field "hopping with life," or at least rabbits. Sally is curious enough to poke into a rabbit hole, not quite bright enough to notice that the rabbit has emerged through another exit. She climbs up a tree and appears entranced by the "lovely song" of a cardinal. Even young children will understand the verbal irony of the vaudevillian conversationon another page. Sally, eager to make friends with these wild animals, sidles out on a branch and introduces herself to an owl: "Hi, My name is Sally." "Who?" "Sally." "Who?" This continues long enough for even Sally to say, "I soon have enough of that." Other comic surprises abound in thee richly illustrated pages: "the fish are jumping," Sally remarks, but readers see that they are jumping in alarm when the Labrador plunges into the lake. Sally realizes that her own love of sticks cannot match the beaver's, and she describes one malodorous skunk as the only "little stinker" in an otherwise nice family. On a particularly funny page, one needs to turn the book lengthwise to see Sally standing directly beneath a huge, rather dismayed or amused moose and to read that she sees tracks but no animal. The fact that Sally is dreaming, not actually having these adventures yet, is made clear when she finds a bush full of canned dog food. Part of the fun here is considering whether dogs dream in these colors reminiscent of those in The Runaway Bunny (Harper, 1942) or in linear text. Another treat is watching Huneck bring together in this dream vision the things that dogs like best eating and sleeping and sniffing things out. The narrative is simple in the best sense: Huneck makes a story out of someone's imagining the events of a long-awaited day. And his illustrations and layered language deliver that story in a style that makes me hear Sally's voice and the sounds of her snores through the night. 2001, Abrams, 38 pages,