Right here on this spot, where today Grandpa drives a tractor in his cabbage field, Indians in ancient times lit their campfires, chipped stone into tools, and then moved on. The moon rose and set over the field, season followed season, trees grew into a forest, and settlers came from across the ocean to clear the land again and make a new home. And one day, years later, a Union soldier crossing that field lost a button . . . Grandpa was digging a ditch when he found that button. Deeper in the ditch he discovered an arrowhead and the bones of a strange beast . . . In graceful words and striking pictures, Sharon Hart Addy and John Clapp chronicle the changes the centuries bring to one field and offer young readers a vivid slice of history.
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From Publishers Weekly:
In this lyrical homage to humankind's relationship to the land, "this spot" is the farm belonging to the narrator's grandfather, and as Grandpa digs a ditch, he discovers clues to its past. The story of the land begins with the Paleo-Indians of the Ice Age: "Indians in ancient times/ lit a campfire/ on a glacial beach." In Addy's (A Visit with Great-Grandma) stately text, spare language evokes the changes of seasons and of centuries, and sets the stage for the artifacts Grandpa uncovers: a mastodon bone, old Indian arrowheads and a button from a Civil War uniform. Clapp, who exhibited his talent for realistic landscapes with mystical qualities in The Stone Fey, here juxtaposes a realistic painting of Grandpa driving his tractor over the fields with a haunting portrait of the Indians, their faces aglow by firelight, sitting under a full moon. This illustration provides a graceful transition to the next spread of a luminous moon that "rose and set,/ over and over./ Season followed season." Together, text and art smoothly convey the passage of time in this specific area near the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan and chronicle its progression from glacial beach to Civil War battleground to what is now patchwork farmland. Readers never see the child narrator, though the grandfather and grandmother have cameo appearances; the effect of these predominantly unpopulated landscapes creates a feeling of reverence for the book's real main characterAthe land itself. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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