#7 The Mystery of the Haunted Lighthouse by Elspeth Campbell Murphy, 1995.
Sarah-Jane’s parents have been planning a trip, and her cousins, Titus and Timothy are coming, too. At the request of an old family friend, Ned, they are going to visit him and take a look at an old lighthouse that he is thinking of buying. He wants to turn the lighthouse into a bed and breakfast.
However, strange things have started happening at the lighthouse. Someone has vandalized the outside, and Sarah-Jane sees a frightening face up in the tower. Could the old lighthouse be haunted?
The theme of the story is faithfulness.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Themes
Since this is a Christian-themed mystery, readers can guess that there won’t be any real ghosts. This is more of a light, pseudo-ghost story, like Scooby-Doo mysteries, with another explanation for what’s happening.
There’s more than one kind of haunting. People can be haunted by memories, and living humans are also attached to the places associated with their happy memories. There is someone who has an attachment to the lighthouse and is unhappy that it’s being sold. This person needs to reconcile their feelings to the situation.
Some Christians don’t like the concept of ghost stories at all. In the book, Sarah-Jane likes hearing ghost stories, although she admits that she doesn’t like remembering them later, when she’s alone at night. She enjoys a little spooky excitement, as long as she knows it’s just a story, and she’s hearing it in a safe setting.
Look Up! by Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Raul Colon, 2013.
This picture book is about the life of Henrietta Leavitt, a “Pioneering Woman Astronomer” during the late 19th century and early 20th century.
The story says that Henrietta had a fascination with the night sky from a young age, often wondering just how high the sky was. When she got older, she formally studied astronomy, although most of the other students were men, and it was an uncommon profession for women.
After she graduated, she found a job with an observatory, although she rarely worked on the telescope. She was part of a team of other women who acted as human “computers”, doing basic calculations by hand and compiling information for others to use. Women like Henrietta were not expected to use this information themselves or draw conclusions from their own calculations, but Henrietta had her natural sense of curiosity and confidence in her ability to use her own mind.
She continued studying in her spare time, and while examining photographs of stars and doing her calculations, she began to notice some patterns that made her wonder about the explanations behind them. She studied an effect where stars seemed to become brighter and then dimmer, a kind of “blinking” effect.
She not only discovered that the existence of some of these stars had not been recorded yet, but she also found herself wondering about the pattern of this twinkling effect. Some stars appeared brighter and seemed to “blink” more slowly between bright and dim than other stars that weren’t as bright. By examining the relative brightness of the stars and the patterns of blink rate, she realized that it was possible to calculate the true brightness of the stars and use that to figure out how far away each star is from Earth. When she presented her findings to the head astronomer at the observatory, he was impressed. By using the chart Henrietta compiled, it was possible to calculate the distances of stars even beyond our galaxy. People of Henrietta’s time initially thought our galaxy might be the entire universe, but Henrietta’s finding shows that it was not and also that our galaxy is much larger than people thought.
The book ends with sections of historical information about Henrietta Leavitt and her discoveries and other female astronomers. There is also a glossary, some quotes about stars, and a list of websites for readers to visit.
My Reaction
I enjoy books about historical figures, especially lesser-known ones, and overall, I liked this picture book. The pictures are soft and lovely.
The only criticisms I have are that the book is a little slow and repetitious in places, and the subject matter is a little complex for a young audience. Some repetition is expected in picture books for young children, but how appealing that can be depends on what is being repeated. Henrietta’s work involves a lot of looking at pictures and figures and studying, so the text gives the feeling of long hours studying and “looking,” and many of the pictures are of her looking at books and examining photographs of stars through a magnifying lens. I found the story and pictures charming and in keeping with the Academic aesthetics, but I’m just not sure how much it would appeal to young children.
The story explains some of the concepts that Henrietta Leavitt developed and discovered, and it does so in fairly simple language. However, I still have the feeling that it would mean a little more to a little older child, who already knows something about astronomy, or to an adult like myself, who just enjoys the charming format of the story.
Part of me thinks that this story could have been made into a little longer book, perhaps a beginning chapter book, which would have allowed for a little more complexity. One of the issues with making the story of Henrietta Leavitt into a longer book is that, as the section of historical information says, “not a great deal is known about her life.” There just might not be enough known details about Henrietta’s life to put together a longer book.
Still, I really did enjoy the book, and I liked the presentation of 19th century astronomers and astronomical concepts. I especially enjoyed the way the story portrayed the concept of “human computers.” This type of profession no longer exists because we have electronic computers and computer programs that perform mathematical calculations faster than human beings can, but before that technology existed, humans had to do it themselves. “Human computers” had to work in groups to get through massive amounts of data and calculations, and it was long and tedious work, but their work was largely hidden from the public eye. As the story says, they were expected to do mathematical calculations and compile data, but they were compiling it for someone else’s use. Someone else would use their data to draw conclusions, and that person usually got the credit for whatever they discovered, ignoring all the people who did the grunt work that made it possible. Since women like Henrietta were more likely to be among the “human computers”, working in the background, they often didn’t get much credit for their work. The male astronomers were more likely to be the ones analyzing data and taking credit for the conclusions they drew, although they didn’t do the background calculations themselves. What made Henrietta different was that she stepped beyond the role of simply compiling information but also took on the role of studying patterns and drawing conclusions from the data she was compiling. She did all of it, from compiling data and making calculations to interpreting the data and laying out conclusions and discoveries from it.
Women once worked in similar positions as “human computers” at NASA. The 2016 movie Hidden Figures was about women working as “human computers” at NASA in the 1960s.
Maria’s Comet by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by Deborah Lanino, 1999.
This picture book is a fictional story about a real person, Maria Mitchell. (She pronounced her first name “ma-RYE-ah”, not “ma-REE-ah”.) Maria Mitchell was born into a Quaker family on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts in 1818, and she became the first female astronomer in the United States. She is known for discovering a comet only viewable through a telescope in 1847, and she also became the first astronomy professor at Vassar College. She is the namesake of the Maria Mitchell Association, a science center on Nantucket. She was also an abolitionist, although this topic is not touched on in the book. Maria’s father taught her about astronomy when she was young and encouraged her interests and career at a time when not many women were encouraged to pursue careers or higher education.
Maria’s papa is an astronomer. At night, he goes up on the roof their house to use his telescope, and he explains how the telescope works, gathering and focusing light to make distant objects look larger and closer than they would with just a person’s eyes. He especially likes to look for comets. In their time, they’re not entirely sure what comets are made of, and that’s part of what makes studying them interesting. Maria imagines what it would be like to travel across the sky with a comet, encountering the different planets.
Most of Maria’s life centers around their house and family in Nantucket. There are nine children in the family, so Maria helps with chores and tells her siblings bedtime stories. Sometimes, she and her brother Andrew go into the attic and use an old atlas to pretend that they’re explorers. When they read books, Maria likes books about astronomers, but Andrew likes books about sailors. He wants to be a sailor himself.
When Andrew gets older, he runs away from his family to go to sea on a whaling boat. The entire family is sad that he is gone, and Maria soothes her siblings by telling them stories about all of the amazing places their brother will go. That night, after supper, Maria asks her father if she can come with him to look through his telescope or “sweep the sky” as she thinks of it. For a moment, Maria thinks they will say no, but they agree. Maria wants to be an explorer of the sky, like her brother wanted to explore the seas.
Maria’s father points out Polaris, the North Star, to Maria and says that sailors use it to navigate. Maria wonders if Andrew might be looking at the same star right now. Then, she sees a comet streak across the sky.
There’s an Author’s Note in the back of the book that explains about the real life of Maria Mitchell. It has some comments about what people of her time knew and didn’t now about the planets. When she was young, people only knew about seven planets in the solar system. Neptune was discovered during her lifetime (although not by her), and Pluto wasn’t discovered until 1930, after she had died. There is also a section about the astronomy terms used in the story and famous astronomers.
My Reaction
I enjoy books about historical people, although the author admits in the Author’s Note that this particular story about Maria Mitchell is fiction. I have mixed feelings about that. I don’t like to fictionalize real people, and I’m not entirely sure whether there’s any truth to the story about Maria’s relationship with her brother and how she felt when he left to become a sailor. On the other hand, I did appreciate how the book showed Maria becoming interested in astronomy by watching her father and joining him in his studies of the sky, which is apparently true. Overall, I did enjoy the story.
The pictures in the book are wonderful. They capture the coziness of an old-fashioned 19th-century home and also the wonderment of looking to the skies and imagining exploring the big, wide world and the stars beyond it.
Five Secrets in a Box by Catherine Brighton, 1987.
This story is about Virginia Galilei (1600-1634), the eldest child of Galileo Galilei, and her perception of his work and equipment as a young child. The book has sections of historical information about Galileo and Virginia in the front and the back inside cover, although the story itself is just about Virginia exploring Galileo’s study.
Virginia, as a young child, knows that her father stays up late at night, studying the night sky, while she is asleep. During the day, she must be quiet to let him sleep. She is not really supposed to touch his scientific instruments, but she can’t resist the temptation to take a look. In her father’s study, she finds a box with five mysterious objects in it, and she investigates what they do.
One of them is a lens that makes small things look bigger. Another is a lens that makes things that are far away look closer. There is another lens that makes everything look blue and another that makes everything look red. Then, there is also a plain, white feather.
Virginia wonders what the purpose of the feather is, and she asks her father about it. He tells her that it is important to his work.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
According to the historical information provided, little Virginia’s mother left Galileo and married someone else while Virginia was still young. Virginia remained living with Galileo and was close to her father. When she was 12 years old, her father sent her to a convent, which was a fairly common way for upper-class girls at that time to get an education. However, Galileo probably intended for his daughters to join the Church as nuns rather than marrying when their education was complete. The book doesn’t explain this, but Virginia and her younger brother and sister were born out of wedlock. Because they were illegitimate (born outside of a legally-recognized marriage – the word “illegitimate” literally refers to someone born outside of the law and legal standing with implications about both the legal status of their parents’ union and the child’s possible future inheritance, depending on the laws of that particular society), their social status was compromised from birth. Galileo believed that it would be difficult for his daughters to find husbands, so joining a convent and becoming nuns would provide the girls with stable lives and careers as well as an education, which is what both of them did. Virginia remained at the convent as a nun, taking the name of Sister Maria Celeste, and unfortunately, died relatively young at the age of 34. The book doesn’t say why, but it was because she contracted dysentery, which is caused by consuming tainted water or food.
The story itself doesn’t really explain the purpose of the five special objects that Virginia examines in her father’s study. Some of them are obvious because readers will recognize what they are and the way they work. The purpose of the feather is left a little mysterious at the end, but readers get the full explanation by reading the section of historical information. Galileo was studying gravity, and apparently, he dropped objects off of the leading tower of Pisa to study how long it took them to fall. A feather will take longer to reach the ground than a stone, but that’s because of air resistance. One of Galileo’s premises was that, if there were no air to produce that air resistance, the stone and the feather would fall at the same rate of time due to gravity. I think I would have preferred to have Galileo explain some of this to his daughter when she asks him about the feather, but the story ends kind of abruptly at that point, with Virginia just playing with the feather. I felt like the ending isn’t exactly an ending without that explanation.
The pictures are the main reason why I really liked this book. They are colorful and realistic, and I thought they did a great job of showing the scientific instruments of the past. I also liked some of the little details of the house included in the backgrounds of the pictures. There is a crucifix hanging on the wall behind the telescope in Galileo’s study because this is a religious household, even though some of Galileo’s assertions about the way the world works clashed with Church teachings and got him placed under house arrest. (The book says that he was “sent to prison”, but he was actually placed under house arrest rather than being sent to a prison because he was elderly and in bad health by that point in his life.)
The book doesn’t go into detail about Galileo’s arrest because that happened later in his life, but he was basically considered a heretic for his belief in Copernicus‘s theory that the sun is the center of the solar system instead of the Earth. That sounds like a rather petty charge, and you might wonder why it matters or what different it could make to religion. It wasn’t a new idea because others had reached that conclusion long before him. Copernicus was never arrested for his ideas, partly because he didn’t live very long after he published them, but his book was placed on the restricted list by the Inquisition.
The reason why the relative positions of the sun and the Earth mattered depend on whether particular Biblical passages are meant to be interpreted literally or figuratively. Under a strict literal interpretation, which was the interpretation approved by the Church at that time, the conclusion was that the Earth was the center of the solar system, so saying otherwise would be to go against the Bible and Church teaching, making it a heresy. It wasn’t so much that the relative positions of the sun and the Earth were that important by themselves so much as the act of apparently contradicting the Bible. The Renaissance era was also the era of the Reformation, where Protestants were breaking away from the Catholic Church, partly because of the questions of literal interpretation of the Bible and Church doctrine. The Catholic Church’s response to that during this period was to become more strict in enforcing moral and doctrinal standards in the Counter-Reformation, so anything that seemed to challenge these aspects of the faith was taken far more seriously during this period. This stance would shift again later in history.
The background and aftermath to this story is far more complex than the story itself, although I think part of the charm of the story is it’s simplicity. This is one particular day and a small incident, seen through the eyes of a child, even though adult readers know that there are bigger events surrounding it.
This picture book is unusual because there are no words in it at all until the very end. It’s all pictures, except for the part that explains the inspiration for the story. The author/illustrator, Mitsumasa Anno, depicts himself as a traveler, traveling through the countryside and towns of Europe. The “story” is the story of his journey, but it’s all in the pictures.
In the first pages of the book, we see Anno arriving by rowboat and either buying or renting a horse. The following pages are a little like the Where’s Waldo/Wally books, showing Anno’s travels. Anno appears somewhere on every page, riding his horse, but readers have to look for him. There are also other things to look for, but readers don’t get that explanation until the very end.
The scenes start out in the countryside, and as Anno goes through towns and cities, they can be very busy, with many people and lots of things happening. Toward the end of the book, Anno goes through the countryside again, and it ends with him riding off toward the horizon.
Along the way, there are interesting, detailed scenes that show various aspects of countryside and town life. There are people working in farm fields, people packing up to move house, some men carving tombstones for a churchyard, some children playing and running a race near their school, and a busy market square.
There are also special occasions and very busy scenes, from a wedding in front of a town church to a circus scene and a parade through a city. Aside from the main event in each scene, there are also other things happening in the background, from people working to repair a roof to a prisoner escaping from a castle. Through it all, Anno is always somewhere in the scene, riding the horse.
There is hidden depth to the pictures. There is a section at the back which explains the story behind the book. The author and illustrator, Mitsumasa Anno, is from Japan, but he has always been fascinated by European culture, art, and architecture. Twice, during the 1960s and 1970s, he visited Europe, taking in the sights and producing his own art. This book is based on his travels, and the pictures incorporate the types of towns, fields, and churches he saw. However, they also include many hidden details, including details from famous paintings, characters from books and folktales (and also Sesame Street), and the stories of some of the characters in this book, carried across multiple pages, for readers to notice.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, along with a couple of other books by the same author, in a similar format, Anno’s Italy and Anno’s Britain.
My Reaction
I enjoy books with detailed pictures, especially ones that contain details for readers to notice, like a game. I didn’t see many of the details that are hidden in plain sight until after I read the explanation of what to look for, but there is quite a lot to see in this book. It’s the kind of book that you can look at many times and notice something new every time! Although this is considered a children’s picture book, I think that there are many things that adults might see in it that would go over the heads of children. Children wouldn’t be likely to get all of the art references, for example. It’s a book that can appeal to a variety of people of different ages!
Moonflute by Audrey Wood, illustrated by Don Wood, 1980, 1986.
One night, a little girl named Firen can’t sleep. It’s a hot summer night, the moon is full, and Firen feels like the moon has taken away her sleep, so she must go out into the night and look for it.
Outside, Firen raises up her hands to the moon and asks for her sleep back. The magical moon sends her a moonbeam, and when Firen touches it, she realizes that it’s solid. It’s actually a flute. When Firen plays the flute, it makes magical music that doesn’t sound like any normal flute, and it brings all sorts of wonderful smells of things that Firen loves. As she continues to play, she feels light and tingly, and she realizes that she is rising into the air!
Firen flies over the countryside, looking for her sleep. As she journeys through the night, she sees various animals and wonders if they have her sleep. She sees cats in a patch of catnip, whales playing in the ocean, and bats and monkeys in a jungle.
When Firen sees a couple of monkeys soothing a baby monkey to sleep, she thinks about her own parents and uses the flute to return home. Is the moonflute helping her find her sleep at home with her parents, or has she actually been asleep all the time?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
This book follows the “It was all a dream” theme, where the main character experiences something fantastic, but they were dreaming all the time. While Firen was wondering where her sleep was, she apparently fell asleep. It isn’t definite that’s what happened, but it’s implied when her parents go to her room, and she’s in bed, without the flute. If readers would like to think of it differently, that Firen really did have her flying adventures, it’s possible to read it that way, too.
The pictures really make this book! The illustrations are oil paintings, and they are beautiful and ethereal. Firen witnesses some stunning scenes, like whales leaping in the ocean, with everything bathed in glowing moonlight.
I was intrigued by the name “Firen” because I don’t think I’ve heard it before, and I like unusual names. I couldn’t find much information about the name online, so it seems like it isn’t very common. I thought at first that it might be a modern, invented name, although one name site says that it has Arabic origins.
The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum by Kate Bernheimer, pictures by Nicoletta Ceccoli, 2008.
In this story, there is a little girl who lives in a castle in a museum, inside a big, glass globe.
Children love to come to the museum and look at her in her castle. The girl also likes it when the children come to see her.
Although the girl in the castle has other creatures to play with and things she likes to do, like making music, she sometimes gets lonely when the museum closes, and all the children go home.
When the girl in the castle dreams, she dreams of the children who come to visit her at the museum, imagining their journeys to come see her.
When the children are visiting or when she’s dreaming about them, the girl isn’t lonely, but when she wakes up from a dream and there aren’t any children, she gets lonely again.
However, the girl gets an idea. If you, the reader, want to be her friend, you can give her your picture. When she looks at your picture, she won’t be lonely anymore!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction
I love the surreal, fantasy pictures in this book! We don’t know exactly what the girl is or why this tiny girl lives in a miniature castle in a museum. The book says that people claim “she’s lived there forever.” She is alive and has feelings, but she seems to be surrounded by fantasy creatures as companions in her castle rather than other people. She doesn’t seem to have parents or family. My theory is that she is a magical, living toy because the museum seems to be filled with other toys, the fantasy creatures in her castle seem to be toys with little wind-up keys in their backs, and the castle itself incorporates little toys and odd-and-ends, like buttons and marbles. However, the girl’s backstory is left up to the imagination of the readers.
This book breaks the fourth wall of the book, with the girl inviting readers to put their own pictures into the book and saying that the girl can see them through the book when they read it. Readers looking at the book keep the tiny girl company when she doesn’t have visitors to her museum. It’s not the first book that I’ve seen that uses the concept of readers keeping a book character company through their books. There is a book from the 1930s called The Tale of Corally Crothers, where a lonely girl with no brothers and sisters goes in search of a friend and finds you, the reader. (I haven’t found a copy of it myself, but you can see some pictures of this book on this site.) Books that involve the reader and invite the reader into their world are charming, and I found the fantasy elements of this particular book delightful!
Raggedy Ann and Andy’s Cookbook by Nika Hazelton, 1975.
This children’s cookbook is inspired by the classic Raggedy Ann and Andy stories, and the recipes are accompanied by illustrations from the original books and quotes from the stories. I think the concept is charming, although I noticed that the quotes included with the recipes don’t always match what the recipes actually are. I think that’s because the author decided to include recipes that don’t relate to the stories directly. For example, the quote included with one of the recipes for breakfast cereal is about sausages, and there is no recipe that includes sausages in the chapter of breakfast recipes.
That being said, I thought that the book had an interesting selection of recipes. Some of the recipes are classics, like pancakes, different types of sandwiches, chicken, meatloaf, and some easy desserts. Some recipes are a little old-fashioned, like the one that is designed for an electric frying pan. I haven’t seen electric frying pans for years, and I’m not sure if people still use them. Other recipes in the book strike me as being very mid-20th century in style, such as the salads that contain some mixtures of ingredients that I think 21st century children might find odd. I noticed that the recipe for baked onions has a note that this might be a treat “for your Daddy or Mommy”, a sort of acknowledgement that an adult might enjoy a baked onion more than a kid would, although the recipe is easy enough for a kid to do, baking the onions alongside baked potatoes.
The book begins with a short chapter about cooking tips, and I was surprised by the instructions for cleaning fish that were included later in the book, with the assumption that kids might be helping to cook fish that they actually caught. It is logical that some kids might actually go fishing and catch fish, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cookbook for children with that assumption or those instructions. Most seem to assume that kids are using store-bought ingredients for their recipes.
The main chapters of the book are:
Beautiful Breakfasts
The recipes included in this chapter are:
Two recipes for making your own breakfast cereal
Cinnamon Toast
Pancakes
Baked Ham
Nest Egg
Electric Frying Pan Breakfast – I don’t know if people use electric frying pans anymore. I’ve seen them before but not for a long time. The breakfast included in this recipe is for bacon, eggs, and toast.
Lovely Lunches
The recipes included in this chapter are:
Cheese and Apple Sandwiches
Cream Cheese and Berry Sandwiches
Ham, Lettuce, and Cheese Sandwich
Stuffed Pita Pocket – The filling is cucumber, tomato, lettuce, and cheese.
Savory Cheese and Bread Pudding
Baked Cheesy Eggs
Super Salads
The recipes included in this chapter are:
Raggedy Ann Salad – This salad is meant to be shaped like Raggedy Ann’s face, with a canned peach half for the head, raisins for eyes, a piece of pepper for a nose, pimiento for the mouth, and grated carrot for hair.
Tossed Green Salad
French Dressing
Carrot, Apple and Raisin Salad
Tomato Salad
Guacamole Salad
Cucumber Galleons – Cucumbers are cut and decorated to look like boats with lettuce for sails.
Raggedy Ann’s Tea Party Book by Elizabeth Silbaugh, illustrated by Laura Francesca Filippucci, 1999.
This book is a children’s guide to planning a tea party with Raggedy Ann. As in the original books, Raggedy Ann is a doll who lives with a girl named Marcella, and she likes to have tea parties with Marcella’s other dolls and stuffed animals.
The book explains how to plan and prepare for a tea party, from figuring out how many guests there will be and making sure there are enough seats for everyone to choosing a menu and games to play. There are tips for making party invitations and a section of recipes in the back of the book.
The food ideas aren’t too complicated. The book recommends keeping preparations simple because a party is about having fun. Setting the table is an activity by itself. Raggedy Ann gets her guests to help her, and they put on music while they do it. They want to make the table setting pretty, and they make sure that everyone knows each other and is included in the conversation. Tea parties are a time to practice good manners and make sure everyone is enjoying the party. At the end of the party, guests can also help clean up while they play music.
For games to play, they recommend the classic game of Telephone, Fiddly Diddly (a guessing game), and Memory Tray, where guests look at a tray of objects for a limited amount of time and then try to remember everything they’ve seen.
The recipes included in the book are:
Easy Chocolate Cakes
Creamy Pink and White Icing
Tiny Sandwiches – They suggest a variety of possible fillings, including tuna, ham, tomato, hard-boiled egg, cucumbers, cheese, fruit, or jam.
Raggedy Ann’s Candy-Heart Cookies – These are heart-shaped cutout cookies because Raggedy Ann has a candy heart.
Uncle Clem’s Super-Simple Scotch Shortbread
Marcella’s Lemonade
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). There is another book by the same author called Raggedy Ann’s Birthday Party Book, about planning a birthday party.
My Reaction
I found it charming and nostalgic, and I loved the colorful pictures! I didn’t read this book as a child, but it is the kind of book I would have liked. The party-planning tips are useful, taking child readers step-by-step through planning the party, inviting the guests, and preparing food and entertainment. I liked the advice to keep things simple, so even the host/hostess can enjoy the party instead of getting stressed over complicating preparations. The recipes in the book fit the tea party theme, and they are simple enough for children to make or at least help in their preparation without being overly simplistic.
Mrs. Gigglebelly is Coming for Tea by Donna Guthrie, illustrated by Katy Keck Arnsteen, 1990.
Elizabeth Ann tells her mother that Mrs. Gigglebelly is coming for tea today, but her mother says that she’s in the middle of her spring cleaning and doesn’t have time to prepare for Mrs. Gigglebelly today. In fact, she suggests that Mrs. Gigglebelly might be busy today, but Elizabeth Ann says that Mrs. Gigglebelly always has time for tea with her.
Since her mother is busy with chores and can’t prepare tea or a cake for Mrs. Gigglebelly, Elizabeth Ann fixes some lemonade and crackers with grape jelly for their “tea.” While Elizabeth Ann waits in the garden for Mrs. Gigglebelly, her mother dashes about, doing her chores.
At first, it seems like Mrs. Gigglebelly isn’t going to come, but she eventually arrives because she always has time for Elizabeth Ann … so does her mother.
My Reaction
This is a cute story about a mother who makes time for her child, even when she’s busy. “Mrs. Gigglebelly” seems to be a game of pretend the mother and daughter play together when they have their tea parties. On this particular day, the mother is very busy, but she still throws together a costume for their game. The book doesn’t say that “Mrs. Gigglebelly” is Elizabeth Ann’s mother, but it’s implied in the story, and in the last picture, readers can see pieces of “Mrs. Gigglebelly’s” improvised costume around the room.
I thought it was sweet that the mother in the story took time for a little fun and silliness and a special moment with her daughter, even though she had work to do. Some mothers might just lecture their child about how they’re busy and the child just has to accept that, but this mother understands that her attention is important to her child. Sometimes, it’s the little moments that mean a lot, even if it’s just pausing to share a snack. She does make her daughter wait because there are things she has to do, but the wait is worth it because the mother follows through and makes the effort to make time for her daughter.
Elizabeth Ann also doesn’t nag her mother about hurrying up or try to convince her mother to drop everything she’s doing and play with her instead of doing her cleaning. Instead, she waits patiently, confident that her mother will have time for her eventually because her mother has already established that her daughter is a priority and that she will make time for her. It looks like this mother-daughter pair understands each other well and that they have a good relationship with each other, and I like that.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 