Beyond explaining the holiday’s significance, Leah’s story will serve to illustrate Judaism’s model of kehilla (community),...
Friends and neighbors help apartment dweller Leah figure out a way to build a communal sukkah for the autumn holiday.
Living in a city high-rise does not afford Leah and her white, Jewish family an opportunity to create their own family sukkah. There is no backyard, and no one is ever allowed up on the roof, so celebrating at someone else’s sukkah is the norm, much to Leah’s dismay. When her friend Ari, also white, wins the Hebrew school poster contest for his painting of a city skyscraper crowned with a fully decorated sukkah, the prize is a real sukkah kit. But how can Ari make use of it without help? Neighbors and friends join in, volunteering to store, carry, build, and decorate this special sukkah everyone will share on the roof of Ari’s apartment house. More than simply celebrating in her own sukkah, Leah comes to understand the value of participating as part of a community. Gouache paintings in the blues and grays of a realistic urban concrete landscape complete the subtly informative narrative, which culminates with a colorful sukkah decked out with fruits and vegetables gifted by the local greengrocer, a black gentile named Al.
Beyond explaining the holiday’s significance, Leah’s story will serve to illustrate Judaism’s model of kehilla (community), in which cooperative spirit brings people together. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68115-513-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Apples & Honey Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
As vivid a demonstration of community as readers are likely to find.
Charity and caring for others—the Jewish concept of “tzedakah”—comes full circle in the story of a big sister who demonstrates generosity to a younger sibling through community outreach.
After she learns about tzedakah at the community center, Dalia comes home and creates a tzedakah box to begin saving for the center’s project. She inserts a dollar from her birthday money and tells her curious little brother, Yossi, that the box holds “a big yellow comforter.” With each new donation to the box earned from her gardening chores and lemonade sales, Dalia adds a butterfly bush and a banana cream pie. Yossi’s confusion grows; how can these things fit in what is essentially a piggy bank? Dalia kindly explains how her money, pooled with the other center participants’, will eventually buy all three for a lonely, homebound elderly woman. In joining his sister, Yossi learns that “Tzedakah means… doing the right things. It means thinking of others and giving them what they need.” Dressen-McQueen’s fully developed summer scenes in acrylic and oil pastel provide a vivid complement to the often–page-filling text, their naive, folk quality bringing great quantities of love and warmth to the tale.
As vivid a demonstration of community as readers are likely to find. (author’s note) (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58246-378-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tricycle
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
The unnamed girl narrates the story, noting their sadness at their grandma’s death and searching for answers by reading the...
A little girl and her younger brother learn to accept their grandmother’s death in this rhyming story that explains the concepts of God, Jesus and Heaven in simplified terms for younger children.
The unnamed girl narrates the story, noting their sadness at their grandma’s death and searching for answers by reading the Bible to her brother. She reads from the Book of John, paraphrasing the familiar text that promises that “there are many mansions in my Father’s house.” The realistic setting of the two children in the boy’s bedroom segues into an interpretation of Heaven as a magical, fanciful place filled with smiling children and dancing animals. The sweet, sometimes sing-song verse describes Heaven as a place where no one is old or sick and where children can safely swim with sharks or fly with eagles. Bryant’s cheerful watercolor illustrations imagine Heaven as a sort of pleasant amusement park with Jesus as the headmaster and where children ride on the backs of flying sheep and climb trees with pigs and frogs. The final pages present a conservative Christian philosophy of confession and acceptance of Jesus as one’s personal savior, with the concluding pages offering a prayer for children and the relevant verses from the Book of John. Additional materials include an explanatory letter to parents and other adults, questions for adults to use with children, Bible verse references incorporated into the text and an “RSVP to Jesus” for use by the child reader.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-310-71601-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Zonderkidz
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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