Hurry! - Hardcover

Harry Hartwick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0152015795 ISBN 13: 9780152015794

Publisher: Harcourt Brace, 2000

Synopsis

In 1916, a young boy named Tom Elson living in Iowa meets a stranger who has an unusual animal called a Farivox, maybe the last of its kind, and Tom becomes determined to buy it. Adapted from Farewell to the Farivox by Harry Hartwick.

About this title

About the Author

Emily Arnold McCully received the Caldecott Medal for Mirette on the High Wire. The illustrator of more than a hundred books for children, she has also won many other awards, including the Christopher Award. Ms. McCully spends part of the year in New York City and part in Chatham, New York.

Reviews

Kindergarten-Grade 3-McCully has adapted this tale from Harry Hartwick's Farewell to the Farivox (Four Winds, 1972; o.p.). She has shortened the story by about a third, but has retained much of the original language, and certainly the author's intent and impact. It is August 1916, in a small town in Iowa when 10-year-old Tom makes a chance visit to the blacksmith shop. A customer waiting for his horse to be shod has with him a strange and rare creature in a cage-an animal with a monkey's face, weasel's body, fox's tail, owl's beak, and intelligent yellow eyes. According to the man, this is a "farivox"-"fari for speak, vox for voice"-and it can talk. He offers to sell it to Tom for 10 dollars. As the boy leaves to raise the money, he hears the creature say "hurry." He frantically attempts to assemble the asking price, but arrives back at the blacksmith shop too late. The customer has departed with the farivox, and despite Tom's attempts to trace them, neither one is ever seen again. The story is framed by a discussion of extinct and endangered wildlife. The tale gently but firmly makes its point and provides an excellent springboard for discussion. A good nonfiction match would be Sandra and William Markle's Gone Forever (Atheneum, 1998). The illustrations are vintage McCully, perfectly capturing the time period and its ambience with brightly colored but soft-edged watercolors. A lovely book with an important message.
Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

McCully's (Mirette on the High Wire) sensitively wrought paintings buoy this eloquent and wistful narrative, adapted from Harry Hartwick's Farewell to the Farivox, which introduces a 10-year-old boy living in Iowa in 1916 and the idea of endangered species. One day, Tom peers into a stranger's crate on a wagon and spies a curious creature. The stranger tells Tom it is a rare farivox--and that it can talk--and the entranced lad negotiates to buy the animal for $10. As he dashes home to collect his savings, Tom hears the critter utter one word: "Hurry." McCully captures the boy's excitement in one spread as he sails past a menacing dog in a vast expanse of cobblestone streets and picket fences, and in another vignette shows his last-ditch effort to come up with a few more coins by returning bottles to the grocer. But by the time Tom returns, the stranger and his farivox have departed. His sense of devastation surfaces unmistakably in an affecting and graceful watercolor painting of the boy's downcast face as shadows engulf him, as well as in a parting shot of him, his back to readers, as if searching the horizon one last time for his coveted pet. The double message of being too late to save a rare animal and of never really being able to own another creature will not be lost on readers. This resonant tale is as pertinent for today's readers as it was in Hartwick's day, and McCully's visual depictions make it perhaps even more accessible. Ages 6-9. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

There's an elegiac quality to this gentle tale that takes place in a small town in Iowa on a Thursday afternoon in August of 1916. Tom Elson looks into the eyes of a mysterious animal, the farivox, and decides that he wants this animal more than he's ever wanted anything. The farivox is said to be a rare animal, possibly extinct, that can talk in a human like voice. Hurry! Tom is sure he hears the farivox say, as he runs off to get the money to buy him. But Tom never sees the farivox again, for it is gone, just as if it had dried up and been blown away by the hot August wind, like dust on one of Iowa's long dirt roads. Framed by stories of the demise of the passenger pigeon and other vanished species, the story holds out the hope that in some remote corner animals thought to be lost may linger on, and that someone, someday, may hear one of them whisper Hurry. McCully's (Monk Camps Out, p. 480) luminous watercolors provide a perfect complement to this well-told tale that despite, or perhaps partly because of, its old-fashioned ambience and carefully paced telling, conveys the irrevocability of loss and gives added urgency to the meaning of hurry. (Picture book. 6-9) -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The exclamatory title builds suspense and so does the jacket painting of a boy rushing down the street. But contrary to expectation, the boy doesn't get where he's going in time. Adapted from Harry Hartwick's Farewell to the Farivox, McCully's picture book tells the story of Tom Elston, 10, who glimpses a very rare animal, a farivox, in a crate in a stranger's wagon. "It talks," the stranger tells Tom, and as Tom rushes off to get the money to buy the farivox, he hears a voice from the crate say, "Hurry!" McCully's beautiful, full-page watercolors depict a small Iowa town in 1916 and the frantic boy tearing through the sunlit streets, trying to get the money. He's too late. The stranger leaves, and the farivox is gone--forever. Is it a legendary animal? A vanished species? We're left with a sense of anticlimax and loss--which is exactly the point of this story of animal extinction. McCully begins and ends with a direct plea for conservation. Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt Brace
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0152015795
• ISBN 13: 9780152015794
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Emily Arnold McCully
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32