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The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton

Jul14

Edward and Eleanor, brother and sister, live in a big old house in Concord, Massachusetts, with their Aunt Lily, a piano teacher, and their uncle Freddy, an addled literary scholar who deeply admires the Transcendentalists, especially “Waldo” Emerson and Henry Thoreau. The problem is a financial one: the bank is about to repossess and raze their home. This impending disaster sets Edward and Eleanor on a quest to find the hidden jewels and treasures that their long lost Uncle Ned And Aunt Nora may have received from an Indian prince, Krishna, and may have left behind when they disappeared as children. Clues in the form of a poem etched into an attic window guide Eddy and Eleanor to enter into dangerous adventures in the form of dreams that really happen, all to find enough treasure to save their home.

This book reminded me of Edward Eager’s books, Half Magic and others, and of Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays and Spiderweb for Two. The adventures of Eddy and Eleanor are both real and dreamlike, and the dreams are dreams with a meaning where the two children participate in a joint-dream but learn life lessons along the way. The dreams and the adventures are all intertwined with the writings and lives of Thoreau and Emerson and Louisa May Alcott as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell in a way that is child-friendly and yet speaks on a different level to adults, too.

For example, in one chapter’s dream Eleanor and Eddy travel through a mirror, like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, and find themselves confronted with a long series of reflections of themselves stretching out to the left and to the right. The children must choose again and again which reflection to follow, and as they follow the sometimes more desirable but wrong path their choices narrow and narrow until the only reflection they can choose is a horrible, degraded and degenerate version of themselves. However, when they go back and choose the right path the land of reflections behind the mirror opens up into a multitude of wonderful choices of who each child could become.

Instead of two choices, there were many. They were unable to choose which was the best, so they picked one at random. And beyond that choice lay a hundred, and beyond the next a thousand. Just as the other maze had led them down a narrowing path until there was no choice left, this one opened out into wide and shining worlds of possibility.

And that scene in its turn reminds me of C.S. Lewis and The Great Divorce and Narnia and “further up and further in.” There’s another dream or vision that the children have at Christmas time of all of the light-bearers of history, from ancient times up through the present day, and one of them is Jesus, perhaps the brightest but only one of a multitude of greater and lesser “lights” who add to the accumulated light of the centuries. It’s not exactly right, but it’s close.

Anyway, I loved this book, and I’m pleased to see that there is are sequels, in fact eight books in all about the Hall family of Concord, Massachusetts, one of which is the Newbery Honor book The Fledgling. I’ve actually read The Fledgling a very long time ago, but all I remember is something about flying and perhaps geese? Anyway, The Diamond in the Window is the first book in the series (Hall Family Chronicles), and the second book, which I hope to read soon, is called The Swing in the Summerhouse. The other books are:

  • The Astonishing Stereoscope
  • The Fledgling
  • The Fragile Flag
  • The Time Bike
  • The Mysterious CIrcus
  • The Dragon Tree

I actually have The Fledgling and The Time Bike in my library. I purchased The Diamond in the Window from Purple House Press, so I have that, too. But it looks as if the others in the series are out of print, so I’ll have to find them used or from the public library if I want to continue reading about the Hall Family and their escapades.

The Court of the Stone Children by Eleanor Cameron

Apr28

The New York Times said of this book, back in 1973, that it was “not just a fine book but a brilliant one—and, in an age when writers are engulfing children with an almost gratuitous realism, it is exciting to read a story that glances back into the literary shadows of memory, fantasy and dream.” In 1974, The Court of the Stone Children won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Eleanor Cameron, who also wrote the Mushroom Planet books, was indeed an accomplished writer, and The Court of the Stone Children is an excellent story, appealing to both adults and children.

It’s a sort of a ghost story. Only Dominique, nicknamed Domi, the girl that Nina meets in the French Museum in San Francisco, isn’t really a ghost. It’s also sort of a time travel story, but Nina doesn’t really travel back in time, except in dreams, and Domi, a French girl of the early nineteenth century, just continues to live a semi-ghostly existence in order to stay close to the objects of her childhood home and perhaps to clear her father’s name. Domi’s father was executed as a traitor and murderer during the reign of Napoleon, and Domi needs Nina to help prove his innocence.

The French Museum that Nina falls in love with, along with museum life in general, is a key component of the story. Anyone who is fascinated with museums and how they work would love this book. And Nina’s growth from an immature and unhappy girl who was forced to move to San Francisco against her will into an understanding seeker of beauty and truth is also a part of what makes the novel shine. The way Ms. Cameron ties all these themes and storylines together—the love of beauty and the past, the search for truth, the nature of reality, the complications of making friends and loving family—all these things make for a beautiful and memorable story that children will carry with them into adulthood.

One minor issue didn’t bother me, but I’m sure it would some readers: in the past, early 1800’s, a fifteen year old girl falls in love with a thirty-five year old man, and he with her, and the two are betrothed to be married. This romantic relationship is presented as somewhat unusual, even for the times, but ultimately wholesome and good. Nothing explicit, or illicit, is described or even hinted at, and although I wouldn’t condone such a relationship nowadays, times were indeed different over two hundred years ago.

I thought The Court of the Stone Children was an excellent book, deserving of the National Book Award and worthy of its place in my library.

I Must Betray You by Ruth Sepetys

Apr21

First of all, Ruth Sepetys is an excellent writer. I read three of her books, Between Shades of Grey, Out of the Easy, and Salt to the Sea, and her ability to place vivid fictional characters within an historical event and context was impressive. The first book, Between Shades of Grey, came out of Sepetys’ own Lithuanian American background and is set in Stalin’s Lithuania and Siberia. The other books, including this latest one set in Ceausescu’s Romania, show evidence of extensive historical research and an ability to create an atmosphere in reading the book that mirrors the cultural ambience of the times.

The place and time of this book are not a good place to be immersed in. In reading about a high school boy, seventeen year old Cristian Florescu, who is attempting to understand how to live in 1989 Romania, I felt a small part of what the people of Romania must have felt: claustrophobia, fear, entrapment, and suspicion. Ceausescu, his family, and his Securitate (secret police) control everything and everyone. And alongside the official apparatus, there are the civilian informers. In her Author’s Note at the end of the book Sepetys says, “It’s estimated that one in every ten citizens provided information.” All of these spies and informers generated thousands and thousands of pages of reports on the daily activities of every citizen, and each page added to “Romania’s perpetual sense of surveillance.”

This story is one that needs to be told, needs to be repeated. I see and hear people in the United States and in Europe flirting with communism, calling themselves “Marxists” or “socialists.” They think that such ideas are “just a better economic system”, that they won’t lead to tyranny or to a cult of charismatic leadership or to poverty and slavery. But everywhere—Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Vietnam, East Germany, and Romania—that’s exactly what communism has produced, has been used to produce. And the stories needs to be told again and again, both as cautionary tales and as a monument to the very real people who suffered under the horror and brutality of life in what was meant to be “just a better economic system.”

Cristian and his friend Luca and his girlfriend Liliana live through the fall of Ceausescu and his regime, but the story doesn’t really have a happy ending. Communism didn’t end in Romania until fifteen years after the death of the Ceausescu’s. And there are still many unanswered questions about what exactly happened in Romania during the rule of communism: who killed whom, and who gave the orders, and who benefitted and how it all came to be. All of the answers to these questions are perhaps buried in tons of records and files and reports, or perhaps just buried, destroyed. I Must Betray You is one attempt to illuminate through story what it felt like and what it required to live in a certain time and place, Bucharest, Romania, 1989 under the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

I Can’t Said the Ant by Polly Cameron

Apr11

This ridiculous rhyming story by Polly Cameron is a lark. Originally published in 1961, it’s the story of how the ant tries to help Miss Teapot who has fallen off the counter. The ant calls on everyone to help–all the kitchen foods and implements, and each one answers with a rhyme and and some helpful advice. With teamwork, they manage to rescue Miss Teapot, and “can’t” turns to “can”.

I Can’t Said the Ant is, alas, no longer in print. However, it’s fairly easy to find a copy of this book in a paperback edition. I’m not sure a hardcover edition was ever published, despite the fact that one hardcover copy is available on Amazon for an exorbitant price. Just get the paperback and enjoy the rhyming game that begins in your home when you read it.

The book is subtitled “A Second Book of Nonsense.” That subtitle made me wonder, of course, about the first book of nonsense by this author, and I found it with a little search online: A Child’s Book of Nonsense: 3 copycats, 3 batty birds, 3 crazy camels, a quail, and a snail by Polly Cameron, published in 1960. I’m not about to pay over $50 for a copy of the first book, which I’ve never seen, but I did find a couple of other books by Ms. Cameron on vimeo that I might check out:

The Dog Who Grew Too Much

The Cat Who Thought He Was a Tiger

"Thank you," said Miss Teapot, 
"You've been good to me. 
Polly, put the kettle on. 
We'll all have tea."

I Can’t Said the Ant is one of the books listed in my Picture Book Preschool book. Picture Book Preschool is a preschool/kindergarten curriculum which consists of a list of picture books to read aloud for each week of the year as well as a character trait to introduce, a memory verse, and activities, all tied to the theme for the week. You can purchase a downloadable version (pdf file) of Picture Book Preschool by Sherry Early at Biblioguides.

When the Sky Falls by Phil Earle

Mar31

2022 Middle Grade Fiction: When the Sky Falls by Phil Earle.

I received a review copy of this book, originally published in Great Britain in 2021, and scheduled for publication in April of 2022 in the U.S. The tagline on the front of my ARC says, “Friendship can come from unexpected places,” and that line does summarize at least one of the themes of this story. In 1940, with his parents unavailable and his grandmother unable to control him, twelve year old Joseph Palmer isn’t to London (instead of being evacuated out of the city) to live with his grandmother’s old friend, Mrs. F.

Joseph is filled with anger, rebellious and quick to take offense from the hurts he has sustained in his short life. When he finds out that Mrs. F. is the sole proprietor of a run-down, war torn zoo in the heart of the city, with most of the animals either sent away or barely surviving, Joseph is even more confused and angry with his grandmother for sending him away, with his father for leaving to go to war, with Mrs. F. for her unyielding personality, with the whole world and the war and “Herr Hitler” and just about everything else, including the silver back gorilla called Adonis.

Joseph continues throughout most of the book to be a prickly and rage-filled character, although we do learn some of the underlying reasons for Joseph’s anger and inability to trust. And just as Adonis is not a tame gorilla (there is no such thing), Joseph is not so much tamed as educated, learning that his impulsive anger and rage do not really serve him well as he navigates the city and the zoo during a war that takes and takes and takes away all that is good and hopeful. Mrs. F. says, at one point in the story, “I hate this war. All of it. All it does is take.”

The story is good. Joseph does grow and learn over the course of the book, in a believable story arc that ultimately ends in both tragedy and hope. But . . . the writing and the details felt a little off in some way. Rough. There’s some language, using God’s name in vain and a few curses sprinkled through, but that wasn’t the real problem. Joseph nurses his rage and anger over and over, and I just couldn’t see where it went, what it really was that redeemed him or relieved him of his fear and hatred. Mrs. F. says more than once that there’s something good deep down inside Joseph. Joseph and Adonis do form a connection, or perhaps even a friendship. And the friendship and loyalty of Mrs. F. and others with whom Joseph lives and works become important to him.

Nevertheless, even with a “four years later” epilogue chapter at the end, the story felt unresolved. I think it would be absolutely traumatizing for animal lovers in the younger end of the middle grades. Joseph’s age, twelve, is a good minimum age for reading this harrowing, but somewhat hopeful, tale. It is a war story, and maybe it would be helpful for middle grade and young adult readers who are having to deal with the horrors of war, at least in the news, again, in Ukraine and elsewhere.

I’m ambivalent. It’s certainly not James Herriot and All Creatures Great and Small, but it might resonate with readers who need something a bit more grim and gritty, but still with a glimmer of hope.

Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Jan18

Wild Swans is the story of three generations of a Chinese family during the rise of Communism, and Mao Tse Tung, and the Cultural Revolution. Jung Chang’s grandmother was a concubine to a Chinese general. She had her feet bound as a child in the traditional Chinese way. But her daughter, Chang’s mother came of age during the conflict between the Nationalist Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek the Communist idealists who followed guerrilla leader Mao Tse-tung. The Changs, mother and father, became dedicated Communists who believed in Chairman Mao and the ideals of the Communist Party without question. True believers, Jung Chang’s parents endured great suffering and hardship for the sake of changing Chinese culture and society into a Marxist Communist paradise. Because she was taught the virtues of communism under Mao and the evils of a capitalist society, Jung Chang came to share their philosophy and to idolize Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book. But eventually, it all came crashing down when Chang’s own family became the persecuted instead of the persecutors during the Cultural Revolution.

“The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings—and had ceased to be taken seriously by others.”

The state of China in 1958, from Wild Swans by Jung Chang

It was horrible, yet instructive, to read about an entire society gone mad in twentieth century China and about how slowly and subtly a utopian ideal can become a nightmare, especially with a power-hungry madman in charge. It happened in Russia with Stalin, in Cuba with Castro, in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez and Maduro, and in China with Mao. From 1958 to 1962, Mao’s Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people in a famine that starved people throughout China. The Cultural Revolution that followed in the late 1960’s killed somewhere between 500,000 and two million people. The number of people who didn’t die but suffered great injury and trauma under Mao’s Communist rule is literally incalculable. Jung Chang’s Wild Swans brings the story of this historic horror down to an understandable but terrible story of one family. The book shows how the first generation suffered in the political corruption and prejudice against women that characterized Chinese culture before Communism, how the second generation came to idolize Mao as the embodiment of their dreams of a socialist paradise, and how Jung Chang herself and her siblings, the third generation, paid the price for their own and their parents’ mistaken ideals.

I think everyone should read this book or another book that shows the true story of what can happen in an authoritarian society run by a charismatic but evil ruler. “Mao hoped his movement would make China the pinnacle of the socialist universe and turn him into ‘the man who leads planet Earth into communism.'” Instead, he became the bloodiest dictator the world has yet known. Some other accounts of twentieth century China, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the aftermath of the late twentieth century.

  • Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang. Middle school/high school account of the experiences of one girl, twelve years old when the Cultural Revolution began.
  • China’s Long March by Jean Fritz. Describes the events of the 6,000 mile march undertaken by Mao Zedong and his Communist followers as they retreated before the forces of Chiang Kai-shek.
  • Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao’s China by Lian Xi. Not the best written book, and definitely for adults. The title pretty much sums up this harrowing and true story of a Catholic girl martyr.
  • Sparrow Girl by Sara Pennypacker. This picture book manages to tell about the backward disaster that Mao’s Great Leap Forward precipitated without being unnecessarily traumatic for young readers. Based on real events in China, when Chairman Mao ordered the people to kill all of the sparrows because they were annoying and stealing too many seeds.
  • Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party by Ling Chang Compestine. Nine year old Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the Cultural Revolution. Young adult to adults.
  • Little Leap Forward: A Boy in Beijing by Guo Yue. In Communist China in 1966, eight-year-old Leap Forward learns about freedom while flying kites with his best friend, by trying to get a caged wild bird to sing, and through the music he is learning to play on a bamboo flute. A gentle introduction to this difficult period of history for younger children.

I’ve not read any of the mostly adult books on these lists, but I’m interested in pursuing at least some of them.

The best books on the Cultural Revolution.

Five Must-Read books about the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Best books about the Chinese Cultural Revolution

The Lion’s Paw by Robb White

Jan1

I got this book for Christmas, and it was the last book I read in 2021. Author Robb White wrote for magazines and for television (several episodes of Perry Mason) and the movies, but he is best known for his 24 novels for young people. His books would be classified as “Young Adult” nowadays. Although they are full of adventure and feature somewhat rebellious and independent heroes, by today’s standards they probably wouldn’t be quite edgy enough for the YA market. I have read four of his books now, and I like them very much.

The Lion’s Paw is the tale of three runaway children who sail fifteen year old Ben’s father’s boat through the inland waterways of south Florida, down the Atlantic coast all the way to Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico. Ben is running away from a guardian who wants to sell his father’s sailboat because the uncle/guardian believes that Ben’s father, a Navy sailor, is dead. (The book was originally published in 1946, so Ben’s dad is assumed either dead or captured by the Japanese in the Pacific during WWII.) The other two runaways, Penny and her little brother Nick, have escaped from an orphanage. The orphanage doesn’t sound exactly cruel, just sterile, regimented, and uncaring. The story begins with Penny and Nick deciding that that they aren’t likely to be adopted by anyone decent and they just can’t stand life in the orphanage anymore. So they run away and meet up with Ben, and off they go!

The story includes tropical storms, bounty hunters, alligator encounters, near escapes, and the hunt for a seashell called the Lion’s Paw. Ben is convinced that if he can find a Lion’s Paw for his dad’s seashell collection, then his dad will come home. The story itself is beguiling with three plucky, courageous, and determined children facing both the dangers of sailing and surviving on the ocean and the strictures of the adult world which threatens to put an end to their freedom and adventure. There are couple of caveats: the children and an adult in the story use slang to refer to the Japanese (“Japs” and “Japoons”), and at one point the children use some potentially deadly weapons to fight a man who wants to turn them in to the searchers for a reward. Being prepared to use deadly force to counter an intruder would probably be disallowed or at least disapproved of if the book were written and published in the twenty-first century.

Still, I thought it was an exciting story with some brave and admirable characters. Both boys and girls, anyone over the age of twelve or so, would enjoy the tale and be inspired, not to run away from home or go out alligator hunting alone, I hope, but to “do hard things” and face difficulties with courage and ingenuity.

2021 MGF: In a Flash by Donna Jo Napoli

Nov11

I’ve enjoyed Donna Jo Napoli’s books in the past; the author blurb says she’s published more than eighty books for children in her long career. Most of the ones I’ve read have been fairy tale and folk tale retellings (The Wager and Zel) or historical adventure tales (Alligator Bayou and North and Song of the Magdalene). Ms. Napoli, a professor of linguistics and social justice at Swarthmore College, is a good writer. Her books tend to fall toward the upper end of the middle grade fiction age group, maybe even pushing into young adult. In a Flash has a child narrator/protagonist, eight years old at the beginning of the story, but the subject matter and setting, the horrible plight of two Italian sisters surviving on their own in WWII Japan (1940-1946), is harrowing enough to call for some maturity in the reader. I was appalled by the suffering that SImona and her little sister Carolina undergo, and I’m a grown up who knew what to expect when the children, toward the end of the story, end up in the city of Hiroshima.

Because the chapter headings have dates affixed at the beginning and the book is written in first person from Simona’s point of view, I thought at first that the author was trying to pretend that this was SImona’s diary or journal. However, the writing isn’t a child’s writing, and the story is told mostly in present tense. Neither of those choices works for a diary entry. So, I soon realized that the dates were just there to assist the reader in knowing how much time had passed between chapters and where the children were in terms of age and in regard to the war. I found the story fascinating, a little slow-moving at first, but the details about life in Tokyo and in Japan as a whole were vivid and enlightening. The cultural differences between Japanese manners, language, and expectations and Italian cultural mores manifest themselves through the eyes of two little girls who struggle to live as the Japanese do while remembering that they are also Italians.

As I indicated, the book doesn’t shy away from the gruesome details of the starvation, fear, political repression, and sheer misery and trauma of living in wartorn Japan, especially as hated Westerners, Italians who were at first welcomed as friends of the Japanese, then despised as traitors after Italy’s surrender to the Allies. The suffering of the common people of Japan, as well as the choice of some of them to resist the suicidal “patriotism” required of them, are also portrayed in the story.

Because of all the suffering and bombing and starvation and imprisonment, the novel read like a Holocaust story, but with a very different setting. I would recommend In a Flash for mature young people who have been reading about the horrors of World War II as a different perspective and view of the atrocities and difficulties of that time.

2021 MGF: Once Upon a Camel by Kathi Appelt

Nov5

First of all, I have a prejudice in favor of books set in Texas, as long as the Texas culture and history is authentic. Once Upon a Camel, set in my native West Texas, is spot on. Secondly, I absolutely loved Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath and thought it should have won a Newbery Award a few years ago. However, not everyone agreed with me. So you may or may not agree with me that Once Upon a Camel is in the top tier of middle grade fiction published in 2021.

The novel is similar in style to The Underneath, but as I said, it’s set in West Texas, not East. And it features an aging, storytelling camel and a family of kestrels caught in a haboob, a giant, overwhelmingly destructive, dust storm. I loved the storytelling and the way it was woven into the greater story. I loved the kindness and courage exhibited by the animal characters.

The animals are anthropomorphized, but they also stay true to their animal nature for the most part. Zada, the camel, is sometimes loud, nurturing as an honorary auntie, and fond of racing (at least, she was a racer in her youth), and not so fond of horses. The kestrel couple, Pard and Perlita, are fierce and loyal and persistently loving. The baby kestrels, Wims and Beulah, are, well, they are babies, much like human children, quarrelsome yet tender with each other, impulsive, prone to getting into trouble, yet definitely lovable. Even the mountain lion, Pecos de Leon, is only a little bit scary and ominous, and he, too is susceptible to the calming influence of a good story.

Zada’s stories come from her history, and they’re the kind of stories that humans would tell in family groups or in communities. They are family stories, and the book is yet another iteration of the theme that “stories will save the world.” In the author’s note at the end of the book, Ms. Appelt writes:

“In these days of so much anger and division, it’s more important than ever that we take time to share our stories, which at their most basic level tie us to each other in fundamental ways. After all we’ve been gathering around campfires and kitchen tables for thousands of years and doing just that. We are, all of us, story beasts, made to tell stories, built for them.”

p. 321

I highly recommend that you make your acquaintance with Zada, the camel, and that you read her stories and the story of the haboob and how Zada and her friends survived in it. We’ve all been experiencing our own massive “dust storms” through the past couple of years, and perhaps a fictional West Texas camel can help us find our own survival strategies. And even if there are no profound lessons to be learned from Zada, a little humor and a light story never hurt in the midst of a storm.

Poet of the Day: Eve Merriam

Jul19

Whatever you do, find ways to read poetry. Eat it, drink it, enjoy it, and share it.

I find it difficult to sit still when I hear poetry or read it out loud. I feel a tingling feeling all over, particularly in the tips of my fingers and in my toes, and it just seems to go right from my mouth all the way through my body. It’s like a shot of adrenalin or oxygen when I hear rhymes and word play.

~Eve Merriam

Poet Eve Merriam was born July 19, 1916. She is the author of three books in my library. Epaminondas and A Gaggle of Geese are listed in my Picture Book Preschool curriculum book and are favorites of mine to read aloud. I also have Ms. Merriam’s book 12 Ways to Get to 11, a delightful book that combines mathematics and poetry and imagination.

Eve Merriam was well known as a children’s poet. She wrote several collections of poetry for young people, including Blackberry Ink, The Inner City Mother Goose, Funny Time, Higgle Wiggle: Happy Rhymes, and It Doesn’t Always Have to Rhyme, as well as many picture books and nonfiction biographies and nature books for children. However, she also wrote poetry for adults and had her work published in magazines and journals such as Poetry Magazine. The following poem, The Escape, comes from the October 1940 edition of Poetry Magazine.

THE ESCAPE

Suddenly in the subway
not having had time to purchase a paper at the newsstand
and having read all the car-cards
(even the Alka-Seltzer verse ones)
I came face to face with my immortal soul
and since it was three stations until my stop
I grew worried;
until I saw a boy passing through the various trains
distributing leaflets upon constipation and cure;
they were printed on both sides, with fine close print at the bottom,
so there was nothing to worry about really, nothing at all.

What a narrow escape! Nowadays, she would always be accompanied by her cellphone to distract from thoughts too dreadful to contemplate. I do recommend Ms. Merriam’s children’s books and poetry not as a distraction, but rather to encounter whimsy and perhaps even thoughts of immortality.

Picture Book Preschool is a preschool/kindergarten curriculum which consists of a list of picture books to read aloud for each week of the year and a character trait, a memory verse, and activities, all tied to the theme for the week. You can purchase an updated, downloadable version (pdf file) of Picture Book Preschool by Sherry Early at Biblioguides.