A chair for my mother

Ages 4-6. A warm story about a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter saving to buy a comfortable chair. Featured on ``Reading Rainbow.''

A tender knockout--from the author/illustrator of, most recently and auspiciously, Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe. ""My mother works as a waitress in the Blue Tile Diner,"" the little-girl narrator begins--and to the accompaniment of vividly colored, direct, proto-primitive pictures, the real-life-like story comes out. At home is a glass jar, into which goes all Mama's change from tips and the money Grandma saves whenever she gets a bargain at the market. ""When we can't get a single other coin into the jar, we are going to take out all the money and go and buy a chair. . . . A wonderful, beautiful, fat, soft armchair."" This is because--we see it as she tells it--all the family's furniture burned up in a fire; and though neighbors and friends and relatives brought replacements (a buttercup-and-spring-green spread to contrast with the charred gray gloom just preceding), ""we still have no sofas and no big chairs."" Only straight, hard kitchen chairs. Then the jar is full; the coins are rolled in paper wrappers, and exchanged for bills; and ""Mama and Grandma and I"" go shopping for the chair. This last sequence is a glory: Grandma feeling like Goldilocks, trying out all the chairs; the very rose-covered chair ""we were all dreaming of,"" plump in the middle of the floor; the little girl and her mother, snuggled in it together. . . and she can reach right up ""and turn out the light if I fall asleep in her lap."" It's rare to find so much vitality, spontaneity, and depth of feeling in such a simple, young book. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.