Robert McCloskey must have had a little girl like Sal. Sal wears old overalls, scuffed-up leather shoes, has mussed-up hair with a few dappled freckles. Today, she is going with her mother to pick wild blueberries on a tall hillside. Now, being little, say 4 years old or so, Sal does her best to do just like her mom and pick blueberries. But, being little, Sal gets tired easily and does like to eat the blueberries just as much as she likes picking them. Coincedentally, a mama bear and her little cub are doing the same thing on the other side of the hill. When little Sal and the little cub get separated from their mothers, a chance meeting between the species shows us the innocence and trusting sense of the very young.
Why we like this book: Blueberries for Sal is a library classic. This being one of Robert McCloskey's simpler stories, Blueberries for Sal compares the relationships between mother and child between two different creatures. It also compares the similarities of the behavior of the youngters. Sal is wide-eyed and trusting, blindly following the mother bear along the hillside; in the same way, the young bear cub is meandering about after the human mother, and finds a bucket of blueberries in her grip that looks very inviting. The youngster's reactions are similar (you can almost picture Sal saying, "Hi" in a quiet manner), and the mothers' reactions are similar ("Oh my!! It's a bear/human!!"). The faces of the creatures are illustrated to reflect this feeling. It's a simple story wrapped around the scene of an afternoon of blueberry picking.
Look for more by Robert McCloskey, coming here soon, but right now at your library.
No comments:
Post a Comment