This quick skip through seven generations of farmers living in the same, ever-expanding house seems less a celebration of family roots than a showcase for Halperin's distinctive talents. Shelby (We Keep A Store, Orchard, 1990, etc.) uses poetic language (``She grew like a bean vine up a pole, like honeysuckle on a fencerow...'') and a comfortably repetitive structure; the narrative moves quickly, each generation passing in a few lines and generally sounding much like the others. Halperin's illustrations take longer to appreciate. Even more than those found in Tres Seymour's wonderful Hunting the White Cow (Orchard, 1993), her country scenes recall those found in late Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, with decorated initials, flowered borders, and arcs and strips of small views surrounding or superimposed on larger panels—all filled with tiny, exactly rendered details. There are some anachronistic touches—would a farmhouse have a telephone in 1880? Would trains of that era have spoked wheels?—but that hardly matters for the pleasure of picking them out, and of watching the ``homeplace'' grow from a log cabin to a rambling, cozy steading. (For a different take on a similar subject, see Alice Schertle's Maisie, above.) (Picture Book. 5-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-531-06882-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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With a little help from his audience, a young storyteller gets over a solid case of writer’s block in this engaging debut.
Despite the (sometimes creatively spelled) examples produced by all his classmates and the teacher’s assertion that “Stories are everywhere!” Ralph can’t get past putting his name at the top of his paper. One day, lying under the desk in despair, he remembers finding an inchworm in the park. That’s all he has, though, until his classmates’ questions—“Did it feel squishy?” “Did your mom let you keep it?” “Did you name it?”—open the floodgates for a rousing yarn featuring an interloping toddler, a broad comic turn and a dramatic rescue. Hanlon illustrates the episode with childlike scenes done in transparent colors, featuring friendly-looking children with big smiles and widely spaced button eyes. The narrative text is printed in standard type, but the children’s dialogue is rendered in hand-lettered printing within speech balloons. The episode is enhanced with a page of elementary writing tips and the tantalizing titles of his many subsequent stories (“When I Ate Too Much Spaghetti,” “The Scariest Hamster,” “When the Librarian Yelled Really Loud at Me,” etc.) on the back endpapers.
An engaging mix of gentle behavior modeling and inventive story ideas that may well provide just the push needed to get some budding young writers off and running. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0761461807
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Amazon Children's Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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A repressive teacher almost ruins second grade for a prodigy in this amusing, if overwritten, tale. Having shown a fascination with great buildings since constructing a model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa from used diapers at age two, Iggy sinks into boredom after Miss Greer announces, throwing an armload of histories and craft projects into the trash, that architecture will be a taboo subject in her class. Happily, she changes her views when the collapse of a footbridge leaves the picnicking class stranded on an island, whereupon Iggy enlists his mates to build a suspension bridge from string, rulers and fruit roll-ups. Familiar buildings and other structures, made with unusual materials or, on the closing pages, drawn on graph paper, decorate Roberts’s faintly retro cartoon illustrations. They add an audience-broadening element of sophistication—as would Beaty’s decision to cast the text into verse, if it did not result in such lines as “After twelve long days / that passed in a haze / of reading, writing and arithmetic, / Miss Greer took the class / to Blue River Pass / for a hike and an old-fashioned picnic.” Another John Lithgow she is not, nor is Iggy another Remarkable Farkle McBride (2000), but it’s always salutary to see young talent vindicated. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8109-1106-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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