Reading the year with Rotmütz

The books are numbered, but the year is a circle: you can begin wherever you are standing. A first winter night is a perfectly good door into the series — the spring book will still be there when the snow goes.

Read slowly. The sentences are short on purpose, and the pauses between them are part of the story. If a page wants to be looked at longer than it wants to be read, let it win.

The guidance on every volume is the same and honest: for reading aloud from about four years, for first reading alone from about seven. Children, like gnomes, vary; trust the child over the label.