plots a sense of the dilemmas and even dangers his protagonists face. In The Snowy Day Peter, about four years old, yearns to join a snowball fight but learns he is too small when a stray snowball knocks him down. Later, he learns how to assume the role of older brother (Peter's Chair), to stand up to his friends when he invites a girl to his birthday party (A Letter to Amy), and to avoid the violence of a gang of older boys (Goggles!). One of Keats&apos; signature story elements is that the children in his books are consistently challenged with real problems that are recognizable to young readers; in solving them, the characters learn and mature. In a later series of four books beginning with Louie, Keats introduces a silent, lonely and brooding child who responds to a puppet during a puppet show with a joyous Hello! Louie lives largely in his imagination, constructing a diorama in a shoebox and escaping into it in The Trip, and building a spaceship out of detritus and traveling among the planets in Regards to the Man in the Moon. But he is resilient enough to search for a candidate for a stepfather, and find one, in Louie's Search, and to learn to stand up to taunts from other children. Keats has said that Louie is the character he most related to, having felt invisible and unloved as a child and escaping through his creative pursuits. Many of Keats' stories portray family life and the simple pleasures in a child's daily routine. Jennie's Hat illustrates the excitement of a child anticipating a present. Goggles! tells the story of boys finding a pair of goggles, and the chase that follows when a gang of bullies wants them, too. Keats drew on his own experiences growing up, often offering positive outcomes as an antidote to his unhappy childhood. Yet the particular events and environments in Keats' stories have an emotional resonance that children around the world have responded to. This was certainly his intention. Keats said, "I wanted The Snowy Day to be a chunk of life, the sensory experience in word and picture of what it feels like to hear your own body making sounds in the snow. Crunch...crunch...And the joy of being alive." After The Snowy Day, Keats blended collage with gouache, an opaque watercolor mixed with a gum that produced an oil-like