Reviews
Hush Harbor: Praying in Secret
“Banks’s highly stylized paintings are wonderfully expressive and amplify the deep emotion of the situation. Her palette of yellows and browns shows people who are swathed in moonlight yet avoids the dimness that night scenes sometimes have. An extensive author’s note View →
Engineer Ari and the Rosh Hashanah Ride
2—In 1892, Ari is selected to engineer the first train between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Filled with pride, he boasts to his friends and neglects to say goodbye to them before he sets off. As the train stops to collect the neces-sary items to celebrate the Jewish New Year—apples, honey, round View →
Always an Olivia: A Remarkable Family History
To explain why each generation of their family has an Olivia, an African American woman tells her great-granddaughter about their Jewish family’s journey across the globe to escape reli-gious persecution. Soft paintings add subtle intensity to this story highlighting the importance View →
Illustrated by Shawn Costello.seder with some help from farmers, a traveling man, and memories of previous celebra-tions. The invented dialogue is stilted, but the subject is intriguing and the heavily illustrated chapter book format makes it accessible to a young audience. An… View →
Jackson and Bud's Bumpy Ride: America's First Cross-Country Automobile Trip
“In his cartoon pictures Hargis depicts all three of his goggle-wearing travelers having the time of their lives, determinedly riding their increasingly mud-spattered horseless carriage through mountains, deserts and storms. The author sticks closely to the historical record in… View →
A Star in My Orange: Looking for Nature's Shapes
“Through one-sentence descriptions and full-color, uncluttered photographs, readers are taken on a journey of discovery in the natural world. Rau begins with a star in the sky and then moves to objects that children might be able to examine more closely to find that shape,… View →
Potatoes at Turtle Rock
“The authors, a mother-daughter team who wrote Tashlich at Turtle Rock have joined with the illustrator of that book to offer one family’s unusual, but creative, observance of Hanukkah. It is the sixth night of the holiday, snowing and cold. Mom, dad, children Lincoln and… View →