Children's Literature
America is a nation of enormous variety and color. Her storytellers have distinct voices, reflecting a history of fierce individualism in a vast and often challenging landscape. The eight stories in this little anthology, the latest in "The Newbery Authors Collection," showcase the skills of six great children's authors of the last century. They are not the stories that won the authors' their awards, but more obscure pieces drawn from their body of work. From the earliest tale, Walter D. Edmonds' upstate New York yarn, Death of Red Peril, to the gentle 1991 Christmas fable, Once in the Year, by Elizabeth Yates, these are quintessentially American stories. Rafting down the Mississippi or rattling into the cotton fields of Arkansas in a rickety wagon, logging in the Maine woods or rounding up cattle on the windswept plains of Montana, the characters speak in regional accents and live in worlds long lost to today's children. These well-crafted stories deserve this new printing, not only because they are great reading, but so that modern children can know about the wonderful world of books that predate Harry Potter. A list of Newbery Award books at the end of the volume will lead them to it. 2001, Gareth Stevens. Ages 8 to 12. Reviewer: Michele Tremaine