JEREMIAH LEARNS TO READ

PLB 0-531-33190-3 A bland take on a worthy theme: when an aging farmer suddenly decides that he’d like to add reading to his many other skills, he washes up and presents himself at the one-room schoolhouse. Unperturbed, the teacher points to an empty seat, and after an unspecified time of practice, both alone and with classmates, the man brings home a book of poetry to read to his wife. Placing their grizzled subject against peaceful rustic backgrounds, Fernandez and Jacobson give him a heroic look through low angles of view, and show him last bringing his wife, a new convert to the pleasures of literacy, to school. Adult new readers may respond to this, but next to stories such as Eve Bunting’s The Wednesday Surprise (1989) and Marie Bradley’s More Than Anything Else (1995), children will gain little sense here of the importance, benefits, or process of learning to read. (Picture book. 6-8)