Grandpa's Tractor

PreS-Gr 2—Garland's artistic genius has never been shown to such advantage as in this book. Grandpa Joe and Timmy drive together to the site of the farm, now abandoned, where the man spent his childhood. The farmhouse is boarded up, and the barn has collapsed; they stand forlornly at the edge of a housing development. Out in the weeds rests a rusty tractor. This dispiriting discovery is leavened by a series of reminiscences about life on a working farm and the many ways in which the now-useless machine was the focus of an average day. "When I was your age, my dad let me sit on his lap and steer the tractor as we plowed the fields"; "In the fall, my father would hitch a wagon onto the back and ride the whole family up to the orchard to pick apples"; "In the winter, we would hook a sled to the tractor and haul firewood to heat the house." Each memory floats atop a spread of extraordinarily lovely, bucolic scenery: woods and fields, chickens and cows, apple trees, fresh vegetables, snow-silvered branches, and always the shiny red tractor. As Timmy listens, he is imagining and coming to respect the tractor and the way of life it represents. The text—occasionally awkward but nicely descriptive—complements the vivid and folksy digitally enhanced artwork. None of these illustrations would be out of place in a fine-arts gallery, and any one of them would be reason enough to own the book. But the pictures and text together compose a loving tribute to the heyday of small farms in America, a time and place that should not be forgotten.—Susan Weitz, formerly at Spencer-Van Etten School District, Spencer, NY