JOHNNY APPLESEED

Schindler (Hog Music, 2000, etc.) beautifully illustrates a poem from the Benéts’ Book of Americans (1933) with spacious scenes of a cheerful, bearded, apple-cheeked wanderer, sometimes seen in youth, sometimes in old age, juggling apples and tending both gnarled fruit trees and slender saplings in sunny, sparsely settled landscapes. Shades of soft greens and rosy apple come from extraordinary use of colored pencils in details that manage to convey the spirit as well as the humor of the legend. The strongly rhythmic verses still roll out grandly—“He has no statue. / He has no tomb. / He has his apple trees / Still in bloom.” And if a Benét seedling, Thomas, has to add an afterword acknowledging that a reference to Indians as “wild things” carries “overtones of a less enlightened period in history,” this brief tribute still makes a stirring companion to more detailed accounts of John Chapman’s history and legend, such as Steven Kellogg’s Johnny Appleseed (1988) or Andrew Glass’s Folks Call Me Appleseed John (1998). (Picture book/poetry. 5-8)