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DOING HER BIT

Name: DOING HER BIT
Author: Erin Hagar
ISBN: 978-1-58089-646-7

A STORY ABOUT THE WOMAN'S LAND ARMY OF AMERICA

by Erin Hagar ; illustrated by Jen Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2016

Crisp dialogue and small dramas propel this story of a young woman’s summer of service in wartime and women’s emerging power...

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Based on real events and people, Hagar’s story follows college student Helen Stevens during the summer of 1917 as the white “New York City college girl” learns farming to support the war effort.

As allies in war-torn Europe struggled with food scarcity despite U.S. supplies, American men trained as soldiers or moved from farms to factories. The Woman’s Land Army of America recruited and trained women to work on farms. Helen, who yearns to do more than roll bandages and knit socks for soldiers, enrolls in the Women’s Agricultural Camp in Bedford, New York, despite her parents’ disapproval. She and other “farmerettes” learn to whitewash a dairy, fence a coop, milk cows, and drive a tractor. Ida Ogilvie, the camp’s director, convinces dubious farmer Davie to give Helen, Alice, and Harriet a day’s unpaid trial. At day’s end, he directs them to return to test their work with livestock. Helen digs in, saying, “If you want us back tomorrow, it’ll be two dollars a day for each of us.” Hill’s Photoshopped gouache paintings, in a palette of green, gray-brown, gold, and pink, use flat color and simple contours to depict fields, workers, and pastel summer skies. Characters are white, perhaps reflecting the camp’s composition.

Crisp dialogue and small dramas propel this story of a young woman’s summer of service in wartime and women’s emerging power on the homefront. (author’s note, web search ideas, bibliography, period posters and photographs) (Picture book. 6-9)

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-58089-646-7

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Charlesbridge

Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY WHISKERS

From the Adventures of Henry Whiskers series , Vol. 1

by Gigi Priebe ; illustrated by Daniel Duncan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2017

Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales.

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The Mouse and the Motorcycle (1965) upgrades to The Mice and the Rolls-Royce.

In Windsor Castle there sits a “dollhouse like no other,” replete with working plumbing, electricity, and even a full library of real, tiny books. Called Queen Mary’s Dollhouse, it also plays host to the Whiskers family, a clan of mice that has maintained the house for generations. Henry Whiskers and his cousin Jeremy get up to the usual high jinks young mice get up to, but when Henry’s little sister Isabel goes missing at the same time that the humans decide to clean the house up, the usually bookish big brother goes on the adventure of his life. Now Henry is driving cars, avoiding cats, escaping rats, and all before the upcoming mouse Masquerade. Like an extended version of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904), Priebe keeps this short chapter book constantly moving, with Duncan’s peppy art a cute capper. Oddly, the dollhouse itself plays only the smallest of roles in this story, and no factual information on the real Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is included at the tale’s end (an opportunity lost).

Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales. (Fantasy. 6-8)

Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4814-6575-5

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Aladdin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ACTION & ADVENTURE FICTION | CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

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ELIZABETH STARTED ALL THE TROUBLE

by Doreen Rappaport ; illustrated by Matt Faulkner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 2016

Rappaport makes this long struggle palpable and relevant, while Faulkner adds a winning mix of gravitas and high spirits.

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Rappaport examines the salient successes and raw setbacks along the 144-year-long road between the nation’s birth and women’s suffrage.

This lively yet forthright narrative pivots on a reality that should startle modern kids: women’s right to vote was only achieved in 1920, 72 years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Indeed, time’s passage figures as a textual motif, connecting across decades such determined women as Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone. They spoke tirelessly, marched, organized, and got arrested. Rappaport includes events such as 1913’s Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., but doesn’t shy from divisive periods like the Civil War. Faulkner’s meticulously researched gouache-and-ink illustrations often infuse scenes with humor by playing with size and perspective. As Stanton and Lucretia Mott sail into London in 1840 for the World Anti-Slavery Conference, Faulkner depicts the two women as giants on the ship’s upper deck. On the opposite page, as they learn they’ll be barred as delegates, they’re painted in miniature, dwarfed yet unflappable beneath a gallery full of disapproving men. A final double-page spread mingles such modern stars as Shirley Chisholm and Sonia Sotomayor amid the historical leaders.

Rappaport makes this long struggle palpable and relevant, while Faulkner adds a winning mix of gravitas and high spirits. (biographical thumbnails, chronology, sources, websites, further reading, author’s note) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)