Dippers. By Barbara Nichol. Illustrated by Barry Moser. Toronto: Tundra Books, 1997.
This is a beautiful, strange, and atmospheric fiction, narrated as the fragments of a letter. It tells of the heat wave of the summer of 1912, when the dippers came up from the Don River into the neighborhoods of Toronto, the same summer the narrator’s sister fell ill with polio. The story is richly evocative of this mysterious moment when the dippers and the polio coincided, collided, and canceled each other out somehow. Barry Moser’s stunning, subtle illustrations bring the dippers to remarkable life, their heavy furry bodies and leathery wings entirely believable.
