Pop's Bridge

by Eve Bunting, C.F. Payne (Illustrator)

Overview

The Golden Gate Bridge. The impossible bridge, some call it. They say it can't be built.

But Robert's father is building it. He's a skywalker—a brave, high-climbing ironworker. Robert is convinced his pop has the most important job on the crew . . . until a frightening event makes him see that it takes an entire team to accomplish the impossible.

When it was completed in 1937, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was hailed as an international marvel. Eve Bunting's riveting story salutes the ingenuity and courage of every person who helped raise this majestic American icon.
Includes an author's note about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780152047733
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/01/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	188,274
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 11.50(h) x 0.38(d)
Lexile:	AD630L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 7 Years

About the Author

Eve Bunting was the beloved, award-winning author of more than two hundred and fifty books for young people, including the Caldecott Medal-winning Smoky Night, illustrated by David Diaz, The Wall, Fly Away Home, and Train to Somewhere.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 1-4-Robert and his friend Charlie Shu spend many an afternoon at Fort Point watching from afar as their dads work on the crews building the Golden Gate Bridge. Robert's father is a high-iron man, a skywalker, and, in his son's eyes, has a far more important and dangerous job than the painting Charlie's dad does. When Robert's mom gives the youngsters a jigsaw puzzle based on an artist's rendering of the yet-to-be completed bridge, Robert hides a piece to give his father the honor of completing the puzzle. When a scaffold falls and 10 men die, however, he realizes that the work is equally dangerous for all involved. While the two families are celebrating the completion of the bridge, he cuts the last puzzle piece, offering half to each dad. "Finish it. It's your bridge. It belongs to both of you," he says. The text is followed by an author's note recounting the Golden Gate's history. Payne's striking mixed-media illustrations bleed off the pages and offer interesting views of the "impossible bridge"-against a star-filled sky, through a binocular lens. The spread featuring delighted throngs, both boys front and center, walking across the bridge at its opening and that of the dads, index fingers meeting across the page to complete the puzzle, say more poignantly than words that people of different backgrounds can come together to accomplish the unthinkable. Deborah Hopkinson's Sky Boys: How They Built the Empire State Building (Random, 2006) features more skywalkers at their dangerous jobs.-Marianne Saccardi, formerly at Norwalk Community College, CT Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Practically bursting with pride, a lad tracks his "high-iron" father through binoculars as the Golden Gate Bridge goes up in this tribute both to the bridge itself, and to the teamwork that built it. Robert's best friend Charlie Shu's dad works on the bridge too, as a painter, but Robert thinks his own father's contribution is much more important. Then a serious accident claims the lives of several workers, causing Robert to understand that the bridge really "belongs" to everyone involved in its creation. Painting with soft-focus realism, Payne effectively captures the finished bridge's magnificence, as well as the widespread public excitement that greeted its opening in 1937. The story doesn't quite hang together, and is laced with mannered symbolism and some questionable cultural history, but like Connie Ann Kirk's Sky Dancers (2004, illustrated by Christy Hale), it offers a cogent glimpse of the human story that lies behind every great building project. (afterword) (Picture book. 7-9)

Kirkus Reviews