Product Review

Former Poet Laureate Donald Hall grew up spending his summers on his grandfather Keniston's farm in what was then rural New Hampshire. It was there that his mother, Lucy, and her sister Caroline, had grown up, milking cows, raising sheep and telling stories about their childhood - a time when the July Fourth parade in Danbury was the biggest celebration of the year (complete with flags, speeches and ice cream) and when a trip to Boston, where toys could be bought for a penny apiece, was counted as a major event. Published in the same format and with the same delightful hand-colored scratchboard illustrations by Michael McCurdy as Lucy's Christmas, this is a piece of Americana that will bring readers back to a simpler and gentler America in which pleasure was derived from making as much as buying, and worth was determined by character, not price.