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Gifts From Georgia’s Garden by Lisa Robinson

Jan24

Robinson, Lisa. Gifts From Georgia’s Garden How Georgia O’Keeffe Nourished Her Art. Illustrated by Hadley Hooper. Holiday House, 2024.

Georgia O’Keeffe, renowned for her iconic paintings of skulls and bones, landscapes and skyscapes, and colorful flowers, was also a dedicated gardener and a warm, welcoming host in her New Mexico home. Her garden in the New Mexico desert not only inspired many of her works but also provided fruits, vegetables, and flowers that graced her table and were shared with friends and visitors.

This picture book offers a glimpse into O’Keeffe’s artistic world, but it serves more as an introduction. It can spark curiosity, leaving readers eager to explore her full body of work, whether online or through other books. The focus here is on her New Mexico garden, where she practiced sustainable gardening techniques to enrich the soil, protect her plants, and cultivate food that nourished both her body and her art.

The author also shares some of the dishes—soups, salads, and desserts—that O’Keeffe prepared for her guests, including a recipe for Pecan Butterballs. As someone who loves anything with pecans, this was a delightful bonus!

This book paints a picture of O’Keeffe as not just an artist, but also a gardener and homemaker who left the “male-dominated” art scene of New York City to create a fulfilling life and career in the New Mexico desert. I admire O’Keeffe’s art, and it’s refreshing to learn how her gardening and love of simple, wholesome food shaped her creative process.

One sentence near the end of the book did leave me pondering: “Georgia grew old in her garden sanctuary, and even when she became blind, she continued to tend her garden and paint.” This statement may prompt children to ask how an artist can paint without sight, a valid question that reminds me of how Beethoven composed music despite being deaf. ‘Tis a puzzlement.

Maybelle The Cable Car by Virginia Lee Burton

Aug29

Burton, Virginia Lee. Maybelle the Cable Car. Houghton Mifflin, 1952.

Maybelle the Cable Car! A San Francisco treat!

Virginia Lee Burton wrote and illustrated the classics Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and The Little House and Katy and the Big Snow. Maybelle the Cable Car ranks right up there with Ms. Burton’s other lovely books. Set in San Francisco, this picture book tells the story of how Maybelle and the other cable cars work hard going up and down the many hills of the city. In their big green barn at night, Maybelle and the other cable car reminisce about the good old days in San Francisco when the city was smaller and slower and every one knew everyone else and everyone appreciated the cable cars. Now the cable cars, who work for the city government, are neglected, and Big Bill the Bus says they are “too old and out of date, much too slow and can’t be safe.”

Like Mary Anne, Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel, Maybelle is in danger of becoming obsolete and being scrapped. But, of course, the book is named for Maybelle, so that can’t happen. “Virginia Lee Burton’s . . . classic story recounts actual events in the city of San Francisco’s efforts to preserve and protect its cable cars and illustrates how the voice of the people can be heard in the spirit of democracy.”

The story of Maybelle the Cable Car might require some explanation of how votes and petitions and ballots work and how people can band together to ask their government leaders to change their plans. But you could just read the book and answer questions afterwards, if asked. Children often don’t need to understand everything in a picture book in order to enjoy it. There are also some technical details about how cable cars work at the beginning of the book that will be of great interest to some children and not so much to others.

I’m adding this book to my guide, Picture Book Preschool, in the new, expanded edition under the subject heading of United States History. It really does show the history of San Francisco from the perspective of the cable cars who remember how the city grew and changed. And with so many picture books and children’s books set in New York City and on the east coast, it’s good to have one that takes place on the west coast. Now, if only I could find a fantastic picture book set on the Gulf Coast!

This Picture Book Preschool book can be borrowed by member families from Meriadoc Homeschool Library.

Evangeline and the Acadians by Robert Tallant

Feb8

This Landmark book, #74 in the series, published in 1957 (the year I was born), tells the story of the Acadians, or Cajuns as they came to be called in Louisiana and Texas, who were exiled from their homes in Nova Scotia. These Acadians were French farmers who settled in Nova Scotia when it was named Acadia by the French, and they were forced to leave Nova Scotia by the British who distrusted them and questioned their loyalty during the many years of war between France and Britain.

It’s a sad story. Tallant compares the plight of the Acadians to the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. While the Acadians were not taken to extermination camps, they were torn from their homes and dispersed up and down the Eastern seaboard, with many of them ending up in prisons or forced labor or just poverty. Families were separated, and many Acadians died on crowded, unsanitary ships or in homelessness after they reached shore.

So my question was: how did so many of the Acadians end up in southwestern Louisiana where they made a new home for themselves? To find out, you’ll have to read the book, or do your own research. It’s a fascinating saga, and Longfellow’s famous poem, Evangeline, only tells a small, fictionalized part of the story. As indicated in the title, Tallant refers to Longfellow’s poem over and over again throughout the book, and readers of Tallant’s book can learn a good bit about what parts of the poem are fiction and what parts are true. The fictional character, Evangeline, looking for her lost love, Gabriel, made the Acadians famous the nineteenth century, and today Cajun culture and history is celebrated in food, song, dance, literature, and entertainment.

Evangeline and the Acadians not only gives the history of the Acadians, but since those Acadian people were a large part of the history of Louisiana itself, the book is a sort of capsule history of the state of Louisiana. Mr. Tallant wrote two other books in the Landmark series, The Louisiana Purchase and The Pirate Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans, and the three books taken together would be an excellent introduction for elementary and middle school students to the culture and history of Louisiana (and even southeast Texas). If I were helping my students of Louisiana heritage to study the history of their own state and region, I would certainly read these three Landmark books with them.

Of course, as I said these books were published in the 1950’s. The last two chapters of Evangeline and the Acadians talks about Cajun life and culture “today.” Children who read the book might need to be reminded that the “today’ of 1957 was much different from the twenty-first century “today.” I doubt very many Cajuns speak French as a first language nowadays or even use Cajun English dialect as the Cajun people have become even more assimilated into the greater American culture.

In addition to this book and the other two Landmark books by Robert Tallant, for those interested in the history and culture of Louisiana and of the Acadians, I would recommend:

Picture Books

  • Freedom in Congo Square by Carole Boston Weatherford.
  • Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges.
  • If I Only Had a Horn: Young Louis Armstrong by Roxanne Orgill.
  • Mr. Williams by Karen Barbour.
  • Little Pierre: A Cajun Story from Louisiana by Robert San Souci.

Children’s books

Picture Book States: Massachusetts

Sep16

Massachusetts

  • Motto: Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem. By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.
  • Nickname: The Bay State
  • State Flower: Mayflower
  • State Bird: Chickadee
  1. Letting Swift River Go by Jane Yolen. Illustrated by Barbara Cooney. Little Brown, 1992.
  2. Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey. Viking Press, 1944.
  3. Bus Route to Boston by Maryann Cocca-Leffler. Boyds Mills, 2009.
  4. Comet’s Nine Lives by Jan Brett. G.P. Putman, 1996.
  5. Obadiah the Bold by Brinton Turkle. Viking, 1969.
  6. Pennies for Elephants by Lita Judge.  Disney-Hyperion, 2009.
  7. Bernard Sees the World by Berniece Freschet. Illustrated by Gina Freschet. Scribner’s, 1976.
  8. A Year in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau. Illustrated by  Giovanni Manna. Creative Editions, 2017.
  9. C Is for Cape Cod by Christie Laurie. Photographs by Steve Heaslip. Islandport Press, 2014.
  10. B Is for Berkshires by Joan Duris. Illustrated by Gillian Jones.  Islandport Press, 2015.

It seems as if there should have been more Massachusetts picture books that rise to the surface when I think about Boston and Cape Cod and Cambridge and all that kind of American heritage kind of stuff. I suppose if I had included the Pilgrims and Massachusetts Bay Colony, there would have been more. But I thought I’d concentrate on the many other sights and events and cultural artifacts that make Massachusetts interesting.

What picture books do you associate with the state of Massachusetts?

Picture Book States: Vermont

Aug24

I’m going to try to make this post a weekly ritual. Vermont is the state for this week, with lots of snow in the book forecast. And farms, lots of farms. With fifty states to travel to, by way of the best picture books I can find, this journey should take about a year.

Vermont

  • Motto: Freedom and Unity
  • Nickname: Green Mountain State
  • State Flower: Red Clover
  • State Bird: Hermit Thrush
  1. Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. Illustrated by Mary Azarian. HMH Books, 2009. This Caldecott Award-winning books tells the story of Wilson Bentley, a man who fell in love with snowflakes and their delicate and varied shapes and patterns as a boy in Vermont and grew up to spend his life photographing them.
  2. Sugaring by Jessie Haas. Illustrated by Jos. A Smith.  Greenwillow, 1996. This picture book is the third in a series of books about Nora and her grandparents’ lives and work on a Vermont farm.
  3. Nora’s Ark by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock. Illustrated by Emily Arnold McCullly. HarperCollins, 2005. Nora’s Ark is based on a real event: the Vermont flood of 1927. In the story, Nora and her family take refuge in Grandma’s house, up on a hilltop.
  4. Snow Comes to the Farm by Nathaniel Tripp. Illustrated by Kate Kiesler.  Candlewick, 2001.
  5. Aaron and His Green Mountain Boys by Patricia Lee Gauch.  Illustrated by Margot Tomes.  Calkins Creek, 2005. 64 pages. This easy reader is set during the Revolutionary War in Bennington, Vermont.
  6. The Canada Geese Quilt by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock.  Illustrated by Leslie Bowman.  Dutton, 1989. 60 pages. Another easy reader/early chapter book in which Ariel and her grandmother work together to piece a quilt.
  7. Fanny in the Kitchen by Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by Nancy Carpenter.  Atheneum,  2001. Subtitled The Whole Story from Soup to Nuts of How Fannie Farmer Invented Recipes with Precise Measurements. Who knew that Fanny Farmer, of cookbook fame, was from Vermont?
  8. Kitty and Mr. Kipling: Neighbors in Vermont by Lenore Blegvad. Illustrated by Erik Blegvad. Margaret K. McElderry, 2005. And who knew that Rudyard Kipling ever lived in Vermont? This historical fiction tale shares the story Kipling and a neighbor girl named Kitty.
  9. Champ and Me by the Maple Tree: A Vermont Tale by Ed Shankman. Illustrated by Dave O’Neill. Commonwealth, 2010. Champ the Monster of Champlain Lake is best friends with the narrator of this rhyming tour through the Vermont countryside.
  10. Sleep Tight Farm: A Farm Prepares for Winter by Eugenie Doyle. Illustrated by Becca Stadtlander. Chronicle Books, 2016. A farm family gets ready for a Vermont winter.

So, what did I leave out? Any Vermonters out there know of a great Vermont picture book not to be missed?