4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Mine! Mine! Mine! Children's Books About Greed
I am old enough to remember a time when we didn't need books to tell us that greed and lying are bad, when it was assumed children would be taught these lessons by their parents.
Sadly, times have changed. Now it seems necessary to educate children — and their parents — on these subjects.
Lucky for us we have two excellent new books to help us do it.
The Caldecott medalist Chris Raschka's lightly illustrated novel PEACHALOO IN BLOOM (Neal Porter/Holiday House, 304 pp., $18.99, ages 10 and up) follows a girl named Peachaloo at the magical moment in childhood when she gains both the power to understand 'what people really mean, not just what they're saying,' and a 'blooming sense of good and evil' — abilities that will soon be sorely needed in her little town in central Pennsylvania's Appalachian Mountains.
Raschka's prose is charming, written in a rural deadpan reminiscent of Kate DiCamillo, and the accompanying drawings are comical and oddball, like many of the novel's eccentric characters. Occasionally Raschka indulges in playing with the world he's created rather than pushing the story along, but taking joy in one's creation is a small sin, and smaller still when the creation is as worthy as the kooky town of Fourwords (whose name refers to the four words carved into the door frames of its oldest buildings: Hope, Faith, Charity and Patience).
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