Davy Crockett

July 1, 2004
PreS-Gr 2-Three serviceable American tall-tale retellings. Brimner captures some of the wild adventures of both Stormalong and Crockett through a combination of dialogue and narrative, but Pitcher is limited to a basic recounting of her famous role of distributing water to the fallen soldiers and standing in for her wounded husband firing a cannon during the American Revolution. The art in Stormalong and in Crockett effectively uses colors and textures to reflect the characters' environment, but the oversized coloring-book-style cartoons make Pitcher's story less believable. Each book includes brief information about the figure in real life and a rather far-fetched recipe (corn cakes for Pitcher, Tennessee grits for Crockett, and tuna sandwiches for Stormalong). Anne Rockwell's They Called Her Molly Pitcher (Knopf, 2002) and Ariane Dewey's The Narrow Escapes of Davy Crockett (Greenwillow, 1990; o.p.) are better choices. The publisher's Web site, which serves as a huge advertisement for Compass Point Books, contains only mediocre sites. Better Web information can be found by simply using a general search engine. Additional purchases at best.-Rita Soltan, Oakland University, Rochester, MI

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