River Town Hardcover - 1999

Details

• Title River Town
• Author Arthur Geisert (Illustrator); Bonnie Geisert
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 32
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston
• Date 1999-03-29
• Illustrated Yes
• ISBN 9780395908914 / 0395908914
• Weight 0.82 lbs (0.37 kg)
• Dimensions 8.35 x 11.3 x 0.51 in (21.21 x 28.70 x 1.30 cm)
• Ages 04 to 07 years
• Grade levels P - 2
• Library of Congress subjects Cities and towns, Seasons
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 98017249
• Dewey Decimal Code 307.720

The Geiserts continue their panoramic documentation of American small town life with this follow-up to Prairie Town (1998). With perspectives that sometimes hover high overhead, and other times just a bit above ground level, this offers sharp- eyed observers four seasons' worth of events in a hamlet which is never shown in its entirety. Over a set of wooden captions (Halloween foretells the end of fall and the beginning of winter. It is a time to turn from work to play'), the illustrator creates a series of finely detailed landscapes, into which he introduces tiny changes, but also a disorienting disassociation of scale by zooming in, for example, on children, then zooming back out for scenes of a train wreck or spring flood. Readers may derive some passing pleasure in locating and poring over successive disasters (and determining their chronology: children skate on one part of the river, while a truck falls through rapidly cracking ice; in the illustration opposite that one, a framed picture of that truck going through the ice hangs in the cafe), but the underlying themesthe co-existence of past and present, the deliberate pace of life and of changeare more clearly evoked in the previous book.
Kirkus Reviews