School Library Journal Review
Gr 1-4-Elsie, Boston born, loves the sounds and sights-and especially the songs-of the city, but when her mother dies, her father seeks comfort on the frontier of Nebraska. Her new prairie home is all grass and sky and silence and Elsie feels small and afraid. Her only companion, a going-away gift, is Timothy Tune, a canary with whom she exchanges songs throughout her solitary days. When the door to the cage is accidentally left open, Timothy flies free, and Elsie is devastated. Leaving her fears behind, she races through the tall grass to find him and begins to understand the sounds of the prairie and takes them to her heart. When Timothy sings his way back to her-just as her father returns from town with hens, a banty rooster, and a hound dog-Elsie realizes that, at last, she has found a "true prairie home." Yolen's evocative story, full of wonder and warmth, rolls smoothly along on carefully worded phrases, capturing the child's emotions as well as the flavor of the time and setting in a simple yet heartfelt way. Small's delivery, completely in sync with the author's, brings Elsie deftly to life. The illustrations, rendered in brush and ink with watercolor and pastel, realize both the streets of Boston and the grasslands of Nebraska with equal ease and aplomb.-Barbara Elleman, Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
When her grief-stricken, widowed father decides to leave Boston to be a pioneer farmer on the Nebraska prairie, Elsie wonders if she'll ever feel at home in the world again. Overwhelmed by "the grass and sky and silence," Elsie cloisters herself in the family's remote sod house. But one day her beloved canary escapes, and Elsie, forced to confront her surroundings, experiences an epiphany: she "finally heard the voices of the plains." Yolen's prose moves gracefully from solemn to euphoric as her young heroine embraces her adopted landscape ("She heard long vees of geese spinning out cries like thread; the creaking call of sandhill cranes.... She clapped her hands and sang back to them, too, skip-rope songs and sea shanties"). But the real draw lies in Small's deeply empathic treatment of his heroine, his unerring sense of composition and color, and, above all, his keen sensitivity to the emotional pull of place. Though Elsie doesn't immediately recognize the beauty of the plains, Small does, imbuing the windswept fields and Elsie's cozy sod house with all the vitality of her former home. Ages 5-8. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
