Kirkus Reviews QR Code
A WEEK IN YANI'S WORLD by Charlotte Zolotow

A WEEK IN YANI'S WORLD

Greece

by Charlotte Zolotow

Pub Date: Aug. 1st, 1969
Publisher: Crowell-Collier

This is the fifth of the new series of Face to Face Books (see Bernheim, Reit, Roberts & Weiss above), and the only thing one can say about the group as a whole is that each will have to be evaluated separately. Here the photos are vital, the text flat tending toward banality. "The smell of the sea" in the fishing village is extolled again and again, and there's a numbing sequence that reads "Games are fun the World over. And ice cream cones the world over leak when you bite the bottom out. And climbing with friends is fun the world over, even if the buildings you climb on are thousands of years old like this one." One does see a real child slicking up for school, learning to add on an abacus, helping his father bring in nets and mend them, fetching flat bread from an old woman and going to the well for water, etc, etc; one wishes; disparately, that the teacher weren't named Miss Acropolis, that the abacus were identified, that the author would withhold her applause.