Amber on the Mountain (Picture Puffins) - Softcover

Johnston, Tony; Duncan, Robert A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014056408X ISBN 13: 9780140564082

Publisher: Puffin Books, 1998

Synopsis

Amber's mountain is beautiful, but it is a lonely place—until the day Anna arrives, bringing both her friendship and the will to teach Amber how to read. Suddenly, Amber's world is filled with a new magic and new challenges. But when Anna returns to the city, will Amber be able to keep reading on her own?

"Heartwarming" —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Tony Johnston's previous books include Grandpa's Song and Yonder (both Dial and Puffin). She lives in San Marino, California. Robert Duncan is a fine artist whose paintings have been exhi-bited throughout the United States. He lives in Midway, Utah.

About this title

About the Author:

Tony Johnston grew up in San Marino California. In her "spare time," Johnston has worked at a children's book store, taught a course on picture book writing at UCLA, and studied poetry writing for children with Myra Cohn Livingston. Although she has published nearly seventy-five books, Johnston never stops working. At this moment she is juggling about ten different story ideas. She is grateful for the many ideas that come to her, for the chance to work toward what has become her life goal—to be a good storyteller.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 1-3-A story about learning to read and write that doesn't quite work. Amber lives a solitary life high in the mountains. Then one day a man comes with a crew to build a road, bringing along his wife and daughter, Anna. She teaches Amber to read before the road is completed; Amber learns to write on her own so she can keep in touch after Anna's family leaves. The process of mastering these skills, while shown to be a slow one, seems to be one in which, as Anna says, you just, "Set your whole self to the task." Johnston, who has used poetic language to great effect in previous books, seems to be straining to be descriptive here. One brief page of text, for example, is crammed with figurative language, some of which is cliched. She uses expressions that seem to evoke an Appalachian setting, a place where "folks" might "roll clean off" of a road; where people say "hey" to one another. Duncan's large, lush oil paintings unfortunately confuse the issues of time and place. While the frontispiece painting and the details of housing have an Appalachian look, the mountains have the sharp ridges of the Rockies. (The cover painting of the girls on a grassy hillside in front of imposing peaks even evokes strong images of Heidi.) While the setting includes no modern touches, the two children's wardrobes seem to be directly out of the current L.L. Bean catalog. Eve Bunting's The Wednesday Surprise (Clarion, 1989) and Florence Heide's The Day of Ahmed's Secret (Lothrop, 1990) do a better job of telling the literacy story.
Barbara Chatton, College of Education, University of Wyoming, Laramie
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Puffin Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 014056408X
• ISBN 13: 9780140564082
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32