Atkins offers a beautifully produced and constructed fictionalized tale of the preacher and midwife Anne Hutchinson, told from the point of view of Susanna, Hutchinson’s youngest child until they arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. Anne does not like the shouting or the harshness of the minister and begins to speak of the Scriptures to neighbors who gather at her home. But leaders of the colony do not take kindly to women preaching, and lock her away from her family for disturbing the peace. They release her when the household is able to move on. Dooling’s full-bleed illustrations are fully imagined in white and earth tones, sculptural modeling and use of negative space. His use of multiple vantage points adds to the drama and effectiveness of the pictures. An author’s note tells how Anne and her younger children eventually settled in what is now the Bronx and were killed by local Algonquian-speaking Indians who cared for Susanna for some years. Atkins tells a complex story of faith and freedom with clarity and strength. (Picture book/fictionalized biography. 8-11)
Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-30365-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
Bunting (I Have an Olive Tree, p. 719, etc.) once again explores larger themes through a quiet family story. Every October, on Lady Liberty’s birthday, Tony and his extended family have a picnic on Liberty Island. The family rendezvous at Battery Park to take the ferry out to the island. Waiting in line, Tony, who thinks the picnic is pretty corny, is approached by a woman, obviously a new immigrant. She gestures her alarm when the ferry departs without her; she is soothed when Tony motions that the ferry will return. Once on the island, Tony’s family has the picnic before toasting the statue and blowing kisses to her. Later, Tony spies the woman he had helped earlier, and the way they look up at the statue, “so still, so respectful, so . . . so peaceful, makes me choke up.” This sense of refuge drifts through Bunting’s text, as fundamental and natural an element of life as are the everyday incidentals she braids into the story and all of which are exquisitely caught by Carpenter’s vivid illustrations. (Picture book. 5-10)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201656-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
Adler (also with Widener, Lou Gehrig, 1997, etc.) sets his fictional story during the week of July 14, 1932, in the Bronx, when the news items that figure in this tale happened. A boy gets a dime for his birthday, instead of the bicycle he longs for, because it is the Great Depression, and everyone who lives in his neighborhood is poor. While helping his friend Jacob sell newspapers, he discovers that his own father, who leaves the house with a briefcase each day, is selling apples on Webster Avenue along with the other unemployed folk. Jacob takes the narrator to Yankee Stadium with the papers, and people don’t want to hear about the Coney Island fire or the boy who stole so he could get something to eat in jail. They want to hear about Babe Ruth and his 25th homer. As days pass, the narrator keeps selling papers, until the astonishing day when Ruth himself buys a paper from the boy with a five-dollar bill and tells him to keep the change. The acrylic paintings bask in the glow of a storied time, where even row houses and the elevated train have a warm, solid presence. The stadium and Webster Avenue are monuments of memory rather than reality in a style that echoes Thomas Hart Benton’s strong color and exaggerated figures. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201378-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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