Big Mama - Hardcover

Crunk, Tony

3.72

29 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374306885 ISBN 13: 9780374306885

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2000

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A portrait of a local hero

All the neighborhood kids agree that Billy Boyd's grandmother is a wonder. She can build freight trains and spaceships, she knows intergalactic code, and she even plays kickball. Best of all are those hot summer evenings when Big Mama treats the whole gang to ice cream. Woody's ice-cream stand is all the way across town, and with Big Mama in the lead, the journey there and back again is always full of adventure.

In this warm, affectionate book, lush and lively illustrations are filled with amusing details of small-town life.

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About the Author:

Tony Crunk won the Yale Series for Younger Poets competition in 1994. He lives in Murray, Kentucky.

Margot Apple has illustrated many books for children, including the popular Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy Shaw. She lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A slice of rural Americana from newcomer Crunk, with a robust cast of children of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Big Mama, benefactress and protectress of a ragtag band of children, knows how to keep them amused on a shoestring. Her home, in what appears to be the hill country of the deep South, is the gathering spot for a half-dozen childrenamong them, an African-American, an Asian, and a boy in a wheelchairwho have the run of the place to live and learn. Meanwhile, Big Mama fashions spaceships out of banana crates and scrap lumber, plays firefly catch-and-release, squires the children to the ice cream parlor, and teaches them a sense of responsibility and civic pride, and a love of homeplace. There is a mellowness here that is tangible, as if a fond recollection of an intimate past is controlling Crunk's pen. The details are marvelously enhanced by Apple's bright colored-pencil illustrations, showing Big Mama as an exemplary force whose saving ethical clarity positively affects everyone within its radiant sphere of influence. (Picture book. 3-7) -- Copyright �2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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