The Journey

From the creators of the Caldecott Honor book The Gardener comes a handsome story about a young Amish girl's first visit to a big city. Each night Hannah writes to a "silent friend" (her journal) about the thrilling sights in Chicago: "If I stacked our home, the barn, and my one-room schoolhouse on top of each other, they wouldn't even reach the fourth floor of one of those huge skyscrapers! The city has more of everything. More buildings. More cars and buses. More people--all kinds of people--with almost all the colors of a quilt in their different clothes and faces." Her exuberance is tempered only by her homesickness, which is beautifully portrayed in illustrator David Small's pictures of Hannah's rural home, alternating with the exciting, strangely parallel depictions of city life. In the illustration for the above journal entry, for example, readers see the gridwork of city streets, with blocky skyscrapers in the background. On the next two-page wordless spread, Small reveals a view through Hannah's mind's eye of the women of her community working together on a similarly gridlike patchwork quilt. Hannah is an appealing guide to the city; readers will be mesmerized by her unique perspectives. (Ages 6 to 10) --Emilie Coulter [via]