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The Lonely Phone Booth

by Peter Ackerman
32p. 978-1-56792-414-5.
COPY ISBN
Gr 3-5 In the corner of West End Avenue and 100th Street in Manhattan there stands an old-fashioned phone booth, a superfluous fixture in our cell-phone world. This lonely phone booth, however, enjoys a happy ending after an electric storm shuts down the city. Finding their cell phones dead but the landlines in working order, a grateful neighborhood rallies to save the booth after a city crew threatens to haul it to the dump. Ackerman injects humor into the tale through a bevy of characters from everyday passersby (a construction foreman needing more cement and a Girl Scout calling for cookies) to the eccentric (a zookeeper looking for a lost elephant and a secret agent needing to change his disguise). Dalton adds wit and color with illustrations that are a combination of individual vignettes and full-page images. A well-paced story but probably most appealing to adults predisposed to preservation projects.-"Barbara Elleman, Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA" Copyright 2010 Media Source Inc.
Once there was a time when the phone booth on the corner of West End Avenue and 100th Street in New York City was always busy. Then people begin putting "a shiny silver object" to their ears. Now they ignore the phone booth--until a storm knocks out cell service. Unfussy illustrations with a mid-twentieth-century flavor add some humor to this nostalgic story.

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