Nana's Book Library

Age: 4+

Particulars (Out of 5):

• Creating beauty and hope instead of adding to misery:  ***** 
• Historical value:  *****  
• Positive role models *****
• Inappropriate language:  None.
• Sexual references:  None.  

Reminder:  Nana’s Books are rated G.  Anyone could read them, or listen to them being read aloud.

It’s 1935, smack in the middle of the Great Depression, and Lydia Grace Finch is leaving her beloved Mama, Papa, Grandma, home and garden in the country to live with her Uncle Jim “until things get better.”

         Many families had to split up during the Depression for survival; there wasn’t enough food or money.  This is an epistolary book: it’s told in letters.  Right away, we learn that Papa has been out of work for a long time, and no one asks Mama to make dresses anymore.  “We all cried, even Papa.  But then Mama made us laugh with her stories about your chasing her up trees when you were both little.  Did you really do that?  I’m small, but strong, and I’ll help you all I can,” Lydia Grace writes to her uncle.  “However, Grandma said to finish my schoolwork before doing anything else.”  

         This sets the tone of the book.  No feeling sorry for themselves.  Making each other laugh instead of giving in to tears.  A can-do spirit.  Mama makes her a new dress (actually, one of Mama’s old dresses that she cut down to fit Lydia Grace) for the trip.  Grandma doesn’t have much to give Lydia Grace for her trip, but what she sends is precious: her love, and seeds.  Grandma is a gardener, and so is Lydia Grace.

         The big city is down on its luck, like the rest of the country.  The train station is grim, dirty and gray.  Uncle Jim owns a bakery and it, too, has seen better days.  And Uncle Jim never smiles.  But Lydia Grace only sees potential.  “Dear Mama, Papa, and Grandma, I’m so excited!!! There are window boxes here! They look as if they’ve been waiting for me, so now we’ll both wait for spring.  And, Grandma, the sun shines down on the corner where I’ll live and work.”

         Christmas comes, and Lydia Grace’s present is seed catalogues from her parents, and bulbs from Grandma.  Her present to them is pictures she drew.  “I wrote a long poem for Uncle Jim.  He didn’t smile, but I think he liked it.  He read it aloud, then put it in his shirt pocket and patted it.”

         I know I say this a lot, but wow, I love this book.  The illustrations are superb, and there’s much to notice on every spread – including, and especially, that Lydia Grace, with the help of Uncle Jim’s employees, Emma and Ed, has planted seeds everywhere.  In hundreds of ways, she is making the bakery, and their lives, better – incrementally, one seed, or smile, or thoughtful gesture at a time.  If you can get through her big, amazing Fourth of July surprise for Uncle Jim without shedding a tear of happiness, well, you’re tougher than I am.

         This book is available in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon.  It is also available for cheapsies used on Amazon, Abebooks, and eBay.  My copy, as you can see from the picture, is well loved, and forever immortalized by the traces of yarn from some craft that got stuck in the tape I used to patch up the cover on the top left.  Also – and who even cares, because what do honors mean?  It’s how much you (and your kids) love the book, and what it means to you, but still – The Gardener won the 1997 New York Times Book Review Notable Children’s Book of the Year and was a 1998 Caldecott Honor Book.

©Janet Farrar Worthington

Note:  I am an Amazon affiliate, so if you do click a link and buy a book, I will theoretically make a small amount of money, but I’m just starting this thing, so I don’t even know how that works.   Still, full disclosure, etc.