June 29, 1999

Rating:
Summary: beautiful story with a fun twist!
Review: The date may have past, but "June 29, 1999" remains a wonderful children's classic!! About a month before the day of the book's title, Young Holly Evans began a special science project. Using weather balloons, she had launched a number of different plants and vegetables in flat boxes into the ionosphere to study their growth. However, on June 29th, a most mysterious event occurred... GIGANTIC vegetables descended from the sky all over the country!! A hiker in the Rocky Mountains discovers turnips the size of houses and "cucumbers circle Kalamazoo".

As they slowly float to the ground (well, the red peppers need some help for some unknown reason), news reports come in from all over the country: gigantic parsnips in Providence, lima beans in Levittown, and arugula in Ashtabula. Wait a second!! Holly is puzzled; she didn't USE arugula as part of her experiment!! What's going on here?? If the arugula, the eggplants and the avocados are NOT part of her experiment, where did they come from??

David Weisner is the author of the Caldecott winning book, "Tuesday" in which frogs on their lily pads suddenly take flight one summer night. His delightful sense of the strange is continued here in "June 29". Like all of his books, the illustrations are lush and meticulously detailed, the reader feels like they could easily walk right into the pictures and be part of the action. The story is short, easy to read, and uses a lot of alliteration, so it can easily graft itself into a language arts lesson.

The story has some wonderfully fun visual jokes that older readers and adults will find fun, for example giant gourds being used as housing in North Carolina and The Big Apple being renamed to The Big Rutabaga (a giant purple rutabaga parades down the streets of New York to a blizzard of ticker tape and streamers). The book does have a wonderful surprise ending that I shall not give away here but will delight readers on the last page or two. If you're a fan of "Tuesday" or merely love an unusual story, you must pick up a copy of "June 29, 1999"!!

Rating:
Summary: beautiful story with a fun twist!
Review: The date may have past, but "June 29, 1999" remains a wonderful children's classic!! About a month before the day of the book's title, Young Holly Evans began a special science project. Using weather balloons, she had launched a number of different plants and vegetables in flat boxes into the ionosphere to study their growth. However, on June 29th, a most mysterious event occurred... GIGANTIC vegetables descended from the sky all over the country!! A hiker in the Rocky Mountains discovers turnips the size of houses and "cucumbers circle Kalamazoo".

As they slowly float to the ground (well, the red peppers need some help for some unknown reason), news reports come in from all over the country: gigantic parsnips in Providence, lima beans in Levittown, and arugula in Ashtabula. Wait a second!! Holly is puzzled; she didn't USE arugula as part of her experiment!! What's going on here?? If the arugula, the eggplants and the avocados are NOT part of her experiment, where did they come from??

David Weisner is the author of the Caldecott winning book, "Tuesday" in which frogs on their lily pads suddenly take flight one summer night. His delightful sense of the strange is continued here in "June 29". Like all of his books, the illustrations are lush and meticulously detailed, the reader feels like they could easily walk right into the pictures and be part of the action. The story is short, easy to read, and uses a lot of alliteration, so it can easily graft itself into a language arts lesson.

The story has some wonderfully fun visual jokes that older readers and adults will find fun, for example giant gourds being used as housing in North Carolina and The Big Apple being renamed to The Big Rutabaga (a giant purple rutabaga parades down the streets of New York to a blizzard of ticker tape and streamers). The book does have a wonderful surprise ending that I shall not give away here but will delight readers on the last page or two. If you're a fan of "Tuesday" or merely love an unusual story, you must pick up a copy of "June 29, 1999"!!

Rating:
Summary: Giant veggies! Aaah!
Review: This is a great idea for a story that worked quite well. The pictures are lovely to look at too. I loved the ending. There are so many children's books out there of varying quality, so I was pleased to come across this little gem.