Review by Booklist Review
The life of a plastic bag in a landfill is extraordinarily uneventful and long 15,000 years, give or take a few millennia but in this former U.S. poet laureate's first picture book, a beige grocery bag serves an array of inventive uses in but a tiny sliver of that life span. Set against a barren plains landscape, Kooser's circular story follows a plastic bag, the color of the skin of a yellow onion, as it travels in a chain of happenstance from landfill, to tree, to stream, and among the various citizens of a nearby town, including a young girl, a homeless man, and a shopkeeper. The muted, dappled colors of Root's gouache and watercolor illustrations are a perfect complement to Kooser's lengthy, meditative passages, which celebrate not only the virtues of economy and ecology but, moreover, the interconnectedness of all things. An excellent opener for discussions about creative reuse and recycling, the book concludes with an informational author's note.--McKulski, Kristen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A plastic bag, "just the color of the skin of a yellow onion," blows away from a landfill and across a wintry rural landscape. With unadorned realism, captured in former poet laureate Kooser's plainspoken prose and Root's (The Birthday Tree) copper and slate-gray watercolors and gouache, a girl finds the bag and fills it with aluminum cans, which she takes to a gas station to cash in. Soon the bag meanders on. A traveler, sleepy beside a bridge, lets the bag slip into the water, and in the morning, a homeless woman fishes it out. After the bag ends up at a secondhand store, its journey comes full circle when the girl from earlier buys a baseball glove and ball from the cozy-shabby shop, not recognizing they're put in the same bag she had before, "because it looked just like every other grocery bag in the world." The reflective message about waste (there's an endnote about recycling plastic bags) is gently balanced against the meditation on the quiet beauty and nobility of objects-and people-that aren't often given a second thought or glance. Ages 5-8. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-6-In his first children's book, the former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner tells an environmental story about a plastic grocery bag as it is blown out of a landfill, over a considerable distance, and eventually into the hands of some people who reuse it. Young Margaret picks it up to carry discarded cans she sells for scrap metal. A woman uses it to block a draft under her door. Two street people pick it up but eventually drop it. A man bundles it with other bags and sells them to a woman who runs a secondhand store. The story comes full circle when Margaret buys a baseball glove and ball there and carries her purchases home in the very bag she had initially found. Root's watercolor and gouache paintings, often golden-hued landscape spreads, follow the bag from its bright early-morning wanderings, through the day and shadowy night, and into the daylight once again. Long, compound sentences flow smoothly as they describe the bag's protracted journey, offering poetic images such as "clouds like enormous black leaf bags" that race across the moon. Older children who can listen to the lengthy text will benefit from hearing the beauty of the language and, in addition, will learn about recycling plastic bags from the informative author's note.-Marianne Saccardi, formerly at Norwalk Community College, CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
A plastic bag escapes a landfill to serve one purpose after another on a cyclical, wind-powered journey. It carries aluminum cans, blocks incoming wind under a door, and joins homeless people's belongings. The wordy story itself refrains from moralizing, leaving the recycling-is-important message for the author's note. The bag's yellow hue stands out in the painterly watercolor and gouache illustrations. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In his first children's title, former Poet Laureate Kooser follows a plastic grocery bag, "just the color of the skin of a yellow onion," on a skittering journey from landfill to thrift shop. The exquisitely observed narrative renders the American landscape's dubious symbiosisnominally natural, persistently industrialworthy of a child's attention: "There were lots of young trees along the ditch, their twigs covered with hard little buds that would soon open, and the bag got caught on a branch and hung there the rest of the night, flapping and slapping in the wind." The author finds people, too, illuminating the good done when "reuse" meshes routinely into everyday life. A girl collects cans and buys a secondhand baseball glove, a man gathers and sells plastic bags to a shopkeeper. Curious readers are drawn toward the bag just as the bag is propelled along its gentle but pernicious cycle. Root's gouache-and-watercolor pictures, suffused with the pale gold light of early-spring dawns, capture the injured land, its quirky denizens and the bag's familiarwellbagginess. Wonderful. (author's note about recycling plastic bags) (Picture book. 5-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
