Scooter - Hardcover

Williams, Vera B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688093760 ISBN 13: 9780688093761

Publisher: Greenwillow, 1993

Synopsis

Elana is thrilled to be living all the way up on the eighth floor of 514 Melon Hill Avenue, an apartment building in New York City. But with her new life come changes--and challenges. Is her shiny scooter up to the crags and potholes of city sidewalks? Will she be able to make new friends? Can she find a way to help out little Petey, who everyone says doesn't talk? And will the kids from Melon Hill win any blue ribbons at the Borough-Wide Field Day?

As Elana coasts toward discoveries and surprises in her new home, she keeps one thing in mind: Anything can happen as long as you have a winning attitude and a cool set of wheels!

Elana Rose Rosen and her mother have just moved to a new apartment, and this is Elana's story about the event-filled summer that follows and the new neighbors and friends that become an important part of her life. "A pleasure to read....A story, told with tremendous inventiveness, of the satisfactions and intellectual excitements of childhood, of the worlds seen, explained and illustrated through the remarkable eyes of a remarkable girl."--New York Times Book Review.

About this title

About the Author:

Vera B. Williams lives in New York City.

In Her Own Words...

"Throughout my childhood I was encouraged to make pictures, tell stories, act, and dance--all of this at a heaven in our New York City neighborhood called the Bronx House.

"Saturdays I painted with a crusading art director, Florence Cane. In her book The Growth of the Child Through Art, I appear under the name Linda. I was sixteen when the book appeared and embarrassed by it. But at age nine I had been totally proud when a painting of mine was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and I was later shown in the Movietone News explaining to Eleanor Roosevelt its Yiddish title, "Yentas."

"In 1945 I went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a unique educational community. I graduated in 1949 in graphic art, which I studied with Josef Albers. Along the way I planted corn, made butter, worked on the printing press, and helped to build the house in which I lived with Paul Williams, a fellow student I married there.

"I wanted that connection of art and community to continue. And it did at the Gate Hill Cooperative, a community we built with other Black Mountain people, a poet, musicians, and potters. I lived and worked there from 1953-1970 (after which I moved to Canada). My children (Sarah, Jenny, Merce) grew up there. For them, we branched out into a school, part of the Surnmerhill movement. The gingerbread houses that led to my first book for Greenwillow I first made in sticky variety at our school. I have always liked to teach and have taught art, cooking, writing, nature study, for nursery age on.

"At forty-six, no longer married, living in a houseboat on the bay at Vancouver, British Columbia, I did my first book. But before that could happen, the fates decreed a stint of cooking and running a bakery at a small school in the Ontario countryside. My love affair with Canada included also a 500-mile trip on the Yukon River. Many of those adventures I put in Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe.

"I also write and draw for adults-short stories, leaflets, and posters. As a lover of children, I try to do what I can to help save their earth from nuclear disaster. This pursuit, too, has added its excitement to my biography, including, in 1981, a month's stay in the federal penitentiary in Alderson, West Virginia (an outcome of a women's peaceful blockade of the Pentagon). Perhaps this experience will some day appear in one of my books. So far I've found children's books a wonderfully accommodating medium where any of my various activities might pop up."

From Kirkus Reviews:

In a narrative akin, in its liveliness and immediacy, to Williams's Stringbean's Trip to the Shining Sea (1988), Elana Rose Rosen describes her first ``2 months + 1 week or 9 weeks + 6 days or...5,961,600 seconds'' in Melon Hill, an urban complex where she and her mom share one-room apartment 8E. From the first day (``I don't know any of those kids...I'm not moping'') to the Labor Day celebration when Elana and the kids she's gotten to know--plus her best friend/cousin, visiting from Toronto--shine in their individual ways, Williams builds a sense of a particular community with every casual-seeming detail. Many of these relate to little Petey, who has selfish, inept parents and has never spoken until he whispers an important message to Elana; to old Mrs. Greiner (``the Whiner''), who turns out to be lovable as well as capable; and to Elana's hard-working mom, who goes to school and holds down a job. The rough marginal illustrations, while credibly childlike, deftly capture both character and action; with creative dexterity, Williams also varies the format with lists, charts (``Diagram of the Zig Zag Day'' of trials and triumphs), healthful recipes (a soup from leftovers could be adapted to any refrigerator's contents), and succinct themes built on initials from chapter titles (``Petey'': ``Petey doesn't/Ever/Talk/Even when he wants to--/Y?''). Disarming in its apparent simplicity, an upbeat, innovative, delightfully engaging, and beautifully crafted first novel about everyday life in the inner city. (Fiction. 7-11) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Greenwillow
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0688093760
• ISBN 13: 9780688093761
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160
• Illustrator: Williams Vera B.