An excellent children’s novel featuring a captivating, charming young girl.
In Liss-Levinson’s (Cookie the Seder Cat, 2011, etc.) fine children’s book, a girl and her family are forced to flee their home to escape Hurricane Katrina.
Gertie, a 9-year-old Jewish girl growing up in New Orleans, loves to eat cookies and sponge cake with her brother Jonah at parties at the synagogue; on Wednesdays, she visits her Grandma Rose at a nursing home and calls out numbers for the bingo game. But when Katrina heads toward the city, Gertie and her family must evacuate. Gertie’s mother instructs her to pack up enough clothes, books and toys for a two-day stay at her aunt’s house in Memphis, Tenn., until the storm passes. Once there, Gertie feels safe but worries about her grandmother, her house, her friends and her father—a dedicated doctor who stays behind to help. Due to the overwhelming disaster, the two-day stay stretches into weeks, and Gertie finds herself having to attend a new Jewish school and make new friends. Much of the book’s success lies in Gertie’s memorable first-person voice. As Gertie relates her struggle to adapt to her new life—and then to return to her old, but substantially altered one—the reader witnesses a character’s slow, beautiful evolution. Gertie learns to compromise, to feel gratitude for the little things and to help those less fortunate than she is. The author manages to capture Gertie’s endearing naïveté as well as her adeptness in making connections and thoughtful choices. Wonderful stories abound; Gertie questions why God didn’t uphold his promise to Noah never to bring another ruinous flood to Earth and, in another scene, holds a burial for her broken Barbie doll in the backyard. When Gertie attempts to surprise her family by concocting a noodle-pudding recipe for Rosh Hashana (with leftover spaghetti and hard-boiled eggs), her brother complains, and she comments, “Jonah, you don’t know any better, because you are only a five year old chef. And I am almost ten. So I have better taste than you. Now and forever. So there. And Happy New Year to you too.” The author includes a helpful glossary of pertinent Jewish terminology and a list of addresses for donating books to organizations throughout the world.
An excellent children’s novel featuring a captivating, charming young girl.Pub Date: April 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470082536
Page Count: 138
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A joyful celebration.
Families in a variety of configurations play, dance, and celebrate together.
The rhymed verse, based on a song from the Noodle Loaf children’s podcast, declares that “Families belong / Together like a puzzle / Different-sized people / One big snuggle.” The accompanying image shows an interracial couple of caregivers (one with brown skin and one pale) cuddling with a pajama-clad toddler with light brown skin and surrounded by two cats and a dog. Subsequent pages show a wide array of families with members of many different racial presentations engaging in bike and bus rides, indoor dance parties, and more. In some, readers see only one caregiver: a father or a grandparent, perhaps. One same-sex couple with two children in tow are expecting another child. Smart’s illustrations are playful and expressive, curating the most joyful moments of family life. The verse, punctuated by the word together, frequently set in oversized font, is gently inclusive at its best but may trip up readers with its irregular rhythms. The song that inspired the book can be found on the Noodle Loaf website.
A joyful celebration. (Board book. 1-3)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-22276-8
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Rise x Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Continuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long (The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud. After the big new yellow tractor, crowds of overalls-clad locals and a red fire engine all fail to pull her out, the little tractor (who had been left behind the barn to rust after the arrival of the new tractor) comes putt-puff-puttedy-chuff-ing down the hill to entice his terrified bovine buddy successfully back to dry ground. Short on internal logic but long on creamy scenes of calf and tractor either gamboling energetically with a gaggle of McCloskey-like geese through neutral-toned fields or resting peacefully in the shade of a gnarled tree (apple, not cork), the episode will certainly draw nostalgic adults. Considering the author’s track record and influences, it may find a welcome from younger audiences too. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-25248-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
SEEN & HEARD
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