Johnny Appleseed

December 1, 2004
PreS-Gr 1 -With a choppy narrative and an illogical flow of events, this book is likely to confuse beginning readers. For example, Johnny trades his seedlings for a pan, a ham, a shirt, and some dirt. The fact that apples eventually grow from these "baby" trees is not mentioned. A few pages later, Johnny abruptly "hands something shiny/to a hopping girl" who suddenly appears pictured in his arms holding an apple. Next, farmers enter the story: "At the end of the day/they can come inside/and bite into an apple/or a sweet apple pie." Youngsters must infer that fruit comes from Johnny's aforementioned trees, and not from the labor of the farmer's plows. Haverfield's watercolor illustrations depict golden scenes and a Caucasian cast of characters. Stick with versions of this tale by Patricia Demuth (Grosset & Dunlap, 1996) and Gwenyth Swain (Carolrhoda, 2001), books for beginning readers that are a bit more challenging but have longer formats that offer increased description and vocabulary to yield flowing narratives with contextual predictability.-Laura Scott, Farmington Community Library, MI

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