From School Library Journal
Grade 2-5–Darcy Heart OHara, the only daughter in a large Irish family, lives in a small cottage in Pobble OKeefe in the 1840s. Born with a gift of seeing small beauties, she finds rocks, petals, and feathers and slips them into the hem of her ragged dress. The family reluctantly emigrates to America, and it is Darcys small beauties that remind them of their old home and give them strength to move on in their new one. Woodruff subtly captures the lilt of Irish dialect, inviting reading the text aloud. Her smooth and descriptive prose takes readers along on the OHaras journey, capturing joyful times when her father danced a jig in the firelight and Granddad spun tales in the glow of the peat fire…. Rexs mixed-media earth-tone illustrations are extraordinarily evocative, offering touching scenes with expressive faces and deep emotion. Rich in detail of the Irish landscape, the art gives a deeper understanding of this powerful story. Together, text and illustrations create a small beauty that gives a human face to immigration.
–Lee Bock, Glenbrook Elementary School, Pulaski, WI Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
K-Gr. 3. From the cover portrait of a sweet-faced child holding a rosary bead to the scene of the girl's tearful parting with her grandmother, this wrenching picture book pulls out all the stops of the emigration story. Life is hard for Darcy's loving family in their Irish village in 1845, but Darcy always finds time to stop and see the small beauties around her. When the potato famine drives the family to America, she takes some of those beautiful things with her, which help the family remember "not just the hurt and hunger but also all the beauty left behind." Woodruff's simple, poetic storytelling combines with Rex's illustrations in charcoal, graphite pencils, and oil to present the drama through Darcy's eyes, including the rubble of the family home after eviction, the journey across the ocean and, always close-up, the little but important things: a pebble, a flower, a hearthstone chip. Pair this with Barbara Shook Hazen's
Katie's Wish (2002) and Valerie Worth's classic
Small Poems (1972).
Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
