Skip to main content

I Know Here

By

Laurel Croza and Matt James
Groundwood, 2010. Unpaged. Picture Book.

From Canada comes this lovely title, winner of the 2010 Boston-Globe Horn Book Award for the best picture book of the year. When the little girl who is the narrator of the story finds out her family will be moving to Toronto from their forest home, she is worried because "This is where I live. I don't know Toronto. I know here." What she knows about "here" is beautifully told and illustrated in the remainder of the story: She knows the "squishy spot by the beaver dam" where her sister catches frogs. She knows the sound of wolves howling in the forest, and "the gravel jumping up and dancing under the tires" as the grocery man drives his truck up the lane. She knows the trailers of her neighbors who have worked with her father on the dam, which will soon be finished. When her teacher asks each child in their small school to draw a picture of what they would like to remember about this place, she draws what she knows and sees along her road in the forest. Then she folds it up to take with her to Toronto. Pictures and text work beautifully together to tell the universal tale of building one home, then leaving it for another. Highly recommended.
Labels:

Comments

curlyq said…
This is a wonderful, beautifully written book with a message applicable to everyone who has left a beloved home. Illustrations mixed between painterly and childlike styles are a perfect match. Thanks for the review!
October 19, 2010 at 12:44 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Funny Farm by Mark Teague 2009

By Anonymous
There are things I liked about Mark Teague's newest book, Funny Farm , and things I didn't like. Where should I start? I'll do the "didn'ts" first. The illustrations show animals personified. Well, some of the animals are. The main characters, Edward, and his farm family relatives, all dogs, are humanized. They stand upright, do farm chores, eat at a table, wear clothes, knit (yes, with paws) and sleep in beds. Most everybody else on and around the farm, who are also animals, act like animals. They are outside, roll in mud, live in the barn, and require care from their owners. It struck me the most on the page spread where there are pigs playing in puddle in the rain and Edward, a black and white boxer, watches from inside the house. I thought "You're a dog! Go play with them!" But, alas, he can't, seeing as how he goes through his entire visit to the farm wearing a suit and red bow tie. Another picture that bothered me was the maple syrup pa...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Girl Who Could Fly by Victoria Forester 2008

By Anonymous
J Fiction 328 pages I almost didn't finish this book. I got to Chapter 4, and was just about ready to quit (a kind of slow story about a girl, name of Piper McCloud, who discovers she can fly, parents freak out, she becomes a social outcast, yadda, yadda) but suddenly, right there in Chapter 4, the story takes a sharp turn and becomes really interesting . Piper finds herself in the company of others like her, but not "fliers", and under the care and authority of Dr. Hellion. I won't even tell you any more. Read this book. Forester does a great job of keeping you wondering who's the good guy and who's the bad? Piper is a likeable, strong, endearing character that girl readers will enjoy. But don't NOT give it to boys! The main male character is an extremely intelligent young man who is one of the ones you wonder about . . . good or bad? This is a good one, well worth your time.
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more