Home Place

Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly beautiful, evocative; to read again and again
Review: A family wandering in the woods finds an old abandoned home place and wonders who lived there. Gradually, the past and present merge and separate --- the black family who homesteaded, dreamed their own dreams, lived, cooked, did chores comes to life briefly, then recedes. But "They were here... for every year the daffodils come up / to trumpet the good news of spring / forever and forever." With a strong and mysterious sense of time and timelessness, memory and imagination, the author's quietly spare words and the illustrator's sumptous, moving pictures move together seamlessly. I have used this in my class (it is one of the books which can kindle endless discussion and serve as an easy, natural springboard for student writing), read it to my own children countless times, and bought it as a gift for friends of all ages. Anyone who has a "home place" in their past; indeed anyone who wonders about what lasts and what falls away, will respond to this moving, lovely book.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Book!
Review: I really found this book interesting and intruiging. A great book to use in a unit on archeology or communities. Very absorbing and different.

Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly beautiful, evocative; to read again and again
Review: On a wlk one day, a girl and her parents find a field of daffodils. Wondering how they got there, they find a chimney and foundation. They imagine how life would have been in the house. Going back through time, a normal family was living there. Now this place is home to just animals.

This was not one of my favorite books. It took a while to understand what was going on. If your child has a vivid imagination, this is a good book for them. The illustrations are beautiful.

Rating:
Summary: class assingment
Review: On a wlk one day, a girl and her parents find a field of daffodils. Wondering how they got there, they find a chimney and foundation. They imagine how life would have been in the house. Going back through time, a normal family was living there. Now this place is home to just animals.

This was not one of my favorite books. It took a while to understand what was going on. If your child has a vivid imagination, this is a good book for them. The illustrations are beautiful.