Sunday, December 27, 2009

Sarah’s Story

Pic courtesy flipkart

Author- Bill Harley
Illustration- Eve Aldridge
Age- 4-8 yrs

Awards- Winner of the National Parenting center of Approval and Best Read Aloud from Storytelling World.

Sarah’s Story is a wonderfully amusing book, with Sarah, a young imaginative child spinning a colorful story, filled with unexpected happenings and unlikely characters.

Sarah’s teacher assigns the class homework- to come up with a story the very next day. Sarah wants to impress and does not want to go with her mother’s boring suggestion of Goldilocks and the Three bears.

Instead she narrates what happens to her on her way to school that morning. She attributes her delayed entry to class, to these adventures where she almost like a modern day Alice meets a talking queen ant who is pregnant and her retinue of ants, a bee that carries her and of course gives her honey, and other magical and interesting things that usually happen in a child’s imagination.

While the class teacher is incredulous about the reality of Sarah’s experiences, she admits it sure makes for a most interesting story.

The detailed illustrations by Eve Aldridge( her first(!!) picture book) are delightful and you will find yourself answering a lot of questions based on them as well. An added touch is the way the words squeeze themselves or drop down or tilt to bring alive the action in the font itself.

Back home, my daughter Anushka often quips “Just like Sarah? That is the rule?” In one scene Sarah asks the queen ant to sample the food before rejecting it and the queen ends up loving the new food. As a result, we have a useful tool to coax kids to try new eatables and even new experiences of the non gastronomic kind.

11 comments:

SoulSpace said...

Wow this is a great story to explore with kids..
Alice is a favourite of mine...
I am sure Sarah will be too...
hope to get it some time

sathish said...

artnavy - very interesting -

"An added touch is the way the words squeeze themselves or drop down or tilt to bring alive the action in the font itself."

That is fascinating - how some publishers use style and font of the words to convey an meaning..

Anusha said...

what fun! Sarah sounds so much like Henry of Henry's Amazing Imagination who loves to spin tall tales for his classroom show-and-tell.
any book that motivates our little ones to try new experiences is a winner :)

Tharini said...

Seconding Sathish. Find the concept of font adding its own twists to the story quite fascinating. Very neat review!

Tharini said...

Just placed a hold on it...cant wait to see it for myself! :)

utbtkids said...

On hold in our library :)))

Sheela said...

Wow, Bill Harley is amazing on NPR... and now you share that Eve Aldridge's illustrations are delightful along with Harley's trademark writing. This sounds exciting! Thanks, artnavy!

Choxbox said...

Lovely Art!

The font changes remind me of Lauren Child :)

Artnavy said...

hi all

do share this story with your little ones and let me know what they think

happy 2010!!

utbtkids said...

Art, reading this book now.

As I thought the girls love it.

The five year old's fav page is the one in which Sarah tells the class the reason for being late. 5Yr old reads it as fast as she can and gasping for breath says, 'my fav page amma'.

Some how the whole concept of going in to an anthill and talking to the queen, satisfying the queen's cravings, flying on a bee....does not seem alien to a small child. They just take it in their stride and manage to be awed by small details like the opening of a step open garbage can of very simple cause and effect things :)

Always manages to put a smile on my face.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Artnavy said...

utbt
great to hear thatthe book is a hit...

just yesterday anush was telling me that i shld try to eat all fruits ( i had refused chikoo) like sarah said....

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