Our Corner Store

March 15, 2020
This companion volume to Rooster Summer (2018) celebrates the pivotal role a neighborhood grocery store plays in the lives of a brother and sister. Speaking in verse and using a lively present-tense, first-person plural voice chock-full of sensory vocabulary, the two siblings "crackle-rackle / through the fall leaves" to Mr. Stanstones' store. There, friendly clerk Bert, who, with "his long apron fluttering / like a huge, crazy, scary bird," is wont to spring out of the walk-in freezer, playfully surprises them. One memorable day Bert takes them into that big freezer, where sausages dangle like "fat party streamers." Spying "gleaming high" jars filled with enormous cookies, the siblings "think their yums / would fill our tums." They "cuddle, cat-chat" with Toby Cat, who lives in the storeroom and surprises them with a "trick and treat" mouse on Halloween. The siblings earn coins for their piggy banks by dusting, stacking cans, "heaping mountain rows" of vegetables, polishing glass (including those cookie jars), and collecting pop bottles. They borrow comic books from the "creaky spin-about racks." When big superstores force the corner shop to close, Mr. Stanstones gives the siblings the cookie jars. Peppered with vibrant verbal images of a bygone era, bubbly, kid-friendly verses are reinforced by cheery, humorous opaque paint-and-colored-pencil illustrations showing the brother and sister freely roaming their beloved corner store and urban neighborhood. Children, clerks, and shopkeepers are white; the neighborhood is diverse. A free-spirited, warmly nostalgic vision. (Poetry. 6-9)

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 8, 2020

Gr 3-6-This illustrated poetry book features a boy in an urban setting recalling fond memories of visiting a corner store with his sister. They shop for their parents, play with the store's cat, play tricks on the clerk, and help to close up shop on Saturdays. Their longing for the store's expensive treats is palpable and endearing as their parents have money only for the essentials. Their pranks are sometimes fun and sometimes mean but dealt with judiciously by their parents. Each chapter is a one- to two-page poem. The innocence of the siblings is conveyed through the poems and through the soft, almost childlike style of O'Byrne's illustrations. When a supermarket opens in the neighborhood, the corner store loses its footing and has to close. The illustration of the big city crowding out the corner store is reminiscent of Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House. Similar to Burton's story, this is a narrative of population and industry increase over time and how such changes impact the local small businesses and families. In the note at the end of the story, the narrator remembers exploring the neighborhood with his sister as a child and contemplates the idea of "it takes a village." The collected work is loosely based on Heidbreder's life and is a follow-up to Rooster Summer but definitely can be read on its own. VERDICT A whimsical novel in verse for older elementary and younger middle school collections.-Lia Carruthers, Gill St. Bernard's Sch., Gladstone, NJ

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.