In this fictionalized episode from the Battle of Long Island, 22-year-old Lieutenant Benjamin Tallmadge wrestles belatedly with the reality of killing and the possibility of being killed on the battlefield. Then, during Washington’s retreat, he risks his life by going back to rescue his beloved horse from the Hessians. To judge from the heavy dose of appended historical information, resource lists, personal statements and other backmatter, both author and illustrator engaged in meticulous research, but it’s not much in evidence in the finished product. Farnsworth lays on (documented, to be sure) heavy rain, smoke and fog to create impressionistic scenes of battle and general misery, while Castrovilla leans more on melodrama than details that modern readers would be able to supply or infer. She also provides only tantalizing references to Tallmadge’s distinguished later career. In addition, the old map reprinted on the endpapers is both hard to read and partially covered by the jacket flaps. This young officer’s crisis of conscience makes a worthy theme to explore, but young students will gain more insight into the soldiers’ war from such conventional nonfiction as Richard Ammon’s Valley Forge (2004). (Nonfiction. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59078-427-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
Strong rhythms and occasional full or partial rhymes give this account of P.T. Barnum’s 1884 elephant parade across the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge an incantatory tone. Catching a whiff of public concern about the new bridge’s sturdiness, Barnum seizes the moment: “’I will stage an event / that will calm every fear, erase every worry, / about that remarkable bridge. / My display will amuse, inform / and astound some. / Or else my name isn’t Barnum!’” Using a rich palette of glowing golds and browns, Roca imbues the pachyderms with a calm solidity, sending them ambling past equally solid-looking buildings and over a truly monumental bridge—which soars over a striped Big Top tent in the final scene. A stately rendition of the episode, less exuberant, but also less fictionalized, than Phil Bildner’s Twenty-One Elephants (2004), illustrated by LeUyen Pham. (author’s note, resource list) (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-44887-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
Spinning lively invented details around skimpy historical records, Taylor profiles the 19th-century chef credited with inventing the potato chip. Crum, thought to be of mixed Native-American and African-American ancestry, was a lover of the outdoors, who turned cooking skills learned from a French hunter into a kitchen job at an upscale resort in New York state. As the story goes, he fried up the first batch of chips in a fit of pique after a diner complained that his French fries were cut too thickly. Morrison’s schoolroom, kitchen and restaurant scenes seem a little more integrated than would have been likely in the 1850s, but his sinuous figures slide through them with exaggerated elegance, adding a theatrical energy as delicious as the snack food they celebrate. The author leaves Crum presiding over a restaurant (also integrated) of his own, closes with a note separating fact from fiction and also lists her sources. (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-58430-255-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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