BARN RAISING
by Craig Brown & illustrated by Craig Brown
Brown (Tractor, 1995, etc.), an Iowa native, returns to his rural roots to celebrate the Amish spirit of community and cooperation with this account of a one-day barn raising. In stippled, finely detailed illustrations, he portrays each step, as dozens of nearly-identical looking men in nearly-identical white shirts, suspenders, and jeans labor to build a stone foundation, raise the framework, and, as shadows lengthen, nail on siding and roof before departing in their horse-drawn carriages. Men and women are distinctly separated in each scene, and children seldom even appear. The text, just a line or two at the bottom of each page, is generally superfluous, though it adds a thread of plot. Next to Jane Yolen’s Raising Yoder’s Barn (1998), the tone here is distant, impersonal, with little by-play or sense of individuality to be seen in the swarm of tiny figures. Like the Geiserts’ surveys of rural and small-town America, however, this will give urban children a view, bird’s-eye though it may be, of another way of life. (Picture book. 6-8)