Letting Swift River Go (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

by Jane Yolen, Barbara Cooney (Illustrator)

Overview

Relates Sally Jane's experience of changing times in rural America, as she lives through the drowning of the Swift River towns in western Massachusetts to form the Quabbin Reservoir.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780785780366
Publisher:	Perfection Learning Corporation
Publication date:	04/04/2019
Edition description:	THIS EDITION IS INTENDED FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

The author of over 300 books, including children’s books, fantasy, and science fiction, Jane Yolen is perhaps best known for Owl Moon, a sweet and tender picture book written in verse about a father taking his child out owling. She is also the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic, a historical fiction novella about a girl who is transported back in time to Poland during WWII.

Editorial Reviews

Like Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House and the Provensens' Shaker Lane , this felicitous marriage of text and art portrays the impact of modernization on one community. Yolen's gently poetic text tells how the young Sally Jane witnesses the forming of the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts and, thereby, the unavoidable drowning of her Swift River valley town. Gradually the streets she traveled and the homes she played in are covered by water for the hungry city's (Boston's) needs. Since young readers caring about Sally Jane will see this plight through her eyes, they are sure to grasp the plot's historical relevance. But the author is telling more than a personal or even a regional story here. Sally Jane's mother's words at the book's end, recalled when the girl and her father are in a boat on the now-filled reservoir--``You have to let them go, Sally Jane''--speak wisely to all of us about our pasts. (These words touchingly echo the mother's earlier admonition regarding trapped fireflies.) Despite the somewhat uninspired jacket painting, Cooney's charmingly detailed, childlike and colorful art is the perfect choice for this New England tale. Children will be captivated by her perspective of earlier days, when kids played mumblety-pegsic one word per Web;letsmake an exception--itlooks too odd/rl and walked to school on scenic country roads. A stirring and resonant book. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly