Inuit storyteller Michael Kusugak, and Czech-Canadian illustrator Vladyana Krykorka - an author/artist team that has also worked together on titles such as Baseball Bats for Christmas and My Arctic 1, 2, 3 - here join forces to tell the story of Kataujaq, a young Inuit girl (named after the rainbow) who loses her beloved mother to a sudden, unnamed illness. Quietly grieving over her loss for a number of years, she is eventually comforted by her grandmother's story of the Northern Lights - said, in Inuit tradition, to be the souls of departed loved ones - and their game of celestial soccer.

The winner of a Ruth Schwartz Award (subsequently renamed the Ruth & Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award) in the picture-book category, Northern Lights: The Soccer Trails combines a poignant tale of loss, and the comfort that tradition can bring, with lovely illustrations. I particularly liked the full-page portrait of Kataujag in her anorak, with the Northern Lights in the background! All in all, an engaging title, one I would recommend to young readers interested in the Northern Lights, or in Inuit Culture, as well as to children who have lost a parent, or other loved one. ( )

Little Kataujaq's life through the seasons of the arctic is described. Later, when her mother gets a coughing sickness and is taken away down south in an aeroplane, never to return, she misses her dreadfully. Then one night when Kataujaq and her grandmother are watching the people play soccer while the the northern lights flash in the sky, her grandmother tells her: "People die, and when they die, their souls leave their bodies and go up into the heavens, and there they live. The thousands of people who have passed before us all live up there in the sky. When they were on earth, they too liked to play soccer. And, even though they no longer live among us, they still like to play. So, on a clear moonlit night, they go out on the giant field up there and play soccer. You can see them, thousands of them, all running around chasing their soccer ball all over the sky."

The story comforts Kataujaq and she imagines she can see her mother in the sky. ( )