Review by Booklist Review
Eleven-year-old Gladys Cailiff is completely smitten with her new teacher. Miss Spivey, who has arrived in Threestep, Georgia, during the height of the Depression, makes quite an impression with her unconventional ways. She smokes cigarettes, wears hiking boots under her skirts, and knows how to drive a truck. But what really animates her is reading aloud to her class from the classic Thousand and One Nights. Then she gets the idea of turning the annual festival into a full-scale Baghdad bazaar, complete with Scheherazade (Gladys' pregnant sister, May) and Aladdin (Gladys' handsome brother, Force), a camel, and sets custom-built by the Cailiffs' ingenious young African American neighbor, Theo Boykin. Indeed, some of Miss Spivey's more radical notions touch on desegregation, which lands her in big trouble with the school superintendent. Stefaniak (The Turk and My Mother, 2004) steals a page from Scheherazade herself, capturing the ordinary lives of the loving Cailiff family while also taking readers on multiple flights of fancy as she tells the complicated backstory of the camel driver. A novel fairly brimming with inventive storytelling and comic brio.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Stefaniak (The Turk and My Mother) delivers a deeply engaging story from the heart of 1930s-era Threestep, Ga., that manages to include stop offs in 1775 Baghdad and 1864 Savannah along the way. Loosely following the tradition of The Thousand and One Nights, which spunky Miss Spivey uses as the core curriculum in her one-room Threestep schoolhouse, the novel is full of intrigue, with babies switched at birth, the Ku Klux Klan, camels fluent in Arabic, and wish-granting genies. Told primarily from the point-of-view of 11-year-old Gladys, the tale begins with the arrival of Miss Spivey, the new teacher in town. Fascinated by the Middle East, she transforms the town into Baghdad, culminating in a bazaar that attracts Georgians from across the state. But the young teacher's progressive spirit proves threatening to some, and her vision falls prey to a tragic chain of events, giving the novel a much-needed boost. In the tradition of Scheherazade, stories are told within stories, by many tellers, creating a nesting doll of events for the young Gladys to get to the bottom of. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In 1938, a new teacher came to the one-room schoolhouse in Threestep, GA, courtesy of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The story of Miss Grace Spivey, who was educated in France and at Barnard College and traveled in Africa and the Near East, is told by thoroughly entranced 11-year-old Gladys Cailiff. Miss Spivey uses Sir Richard F. Burton's ten-volume The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night as her primary textbook. After a successful Halloween event, held a day early so as not to conflict with the activities of the "Ku Klucks," Miss Spivey even manages a full-fledged Baghdad Bazaar, complete with camels. If that's not enough, she is seen spending her free time educating the local black children, including mechanically gifted Theo Boykin, who creates the special effects for the bazaar. Gladys's young voice is perfect for showing how folks thrive and struggle when such a force enters the mainstream, as she herself questions where the lines are drawn and how easily they can be shifted. VERDICT Though set a generation later and in a different sociological stratum, this new work by Stefaniak (The Turk and My Mother) should appeal to fans of Kathryn Stockett's The Help. Highly recommended.-Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll. Lib. (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 Kirkus Book Review
A story set in rural Georgia before World War II that introduces readers to an odd group of characters brought together by a woman ahead of her time.Stefaniak (The Turk and My Mother,2004, etc.) sets the stage for likable narrator Gladys Cailiff, a smart, witty and incisive 11-year-old who lives in the tiny town of Threestep, Ga. Gladys' story begins with the arrival of Miss Grace Spivey, the town's new schoolteacher, a diminutive redhead with a taste for adventure and a propensity for stirring up trouble. As it turns out, Miss Spivey spent some time in Baghdad and decides to duplicate its streets in Threestep after reading parts of The Arabian Nightsto her enraptured students. She also very loosely adapts some of those stories into a play that, along with turkey shoots and dunking booths, they hope will draw visitors from miles around to Threestep. But Miss Spivey doesn't do anything the easy way. She riles up the local school superintendent with her persistence in teaching the "colored" children who are not allowed decent textbooks. Theo Boykin, the Cailiffs' young neighbor and a budding genius, is the main object of Miss Spivey's efforts to give the area's black community a crack at equality, but her effortsmuch admired by the Cailiff familyalways seem to go askew. When she brings in a camel herder and his camels for the big night, all of Miss Spivey's past indiscretions seem destined to catch up with her. Young Gladys is a great narrator, but when May, her perennially pregnant older sister, takes over, the book veers into a mind-numbing story within a story within a story within a story that makes the reader long for Gladys to boot all of those other storytellers and retake the helm.A simple, often engaging tale that unravels in the final third when the author abandons Georgia for Baghdad and never gets back on track.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
