Rachel Field's Hitty: Her First Hundred Years - Hardcover

Rosemary Wells

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689817169 ISBN 13: 9780689817168

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 1999

Synopsis

A doll named Hitty recounts her adventures--from a whaling expedition to the Civil War to the stock market crash--as she moves through a continually changing string of owners, in a full-color adaptation of a Newbery Award-winning novel. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Rosemary Wells, the author and illustrator of more than fifty books, has created such beloved characters as Max and Ruby and Yoko. She helped promote national literacy with her book Read to Your Bunny and illustrated the best-selling My Very First Mother Goose, edited by Iona Opie.

Reviews

Grade 1-5-Purists may balk at this revision of the 1930 Newbery winner, but many modern readers will be charmed by this repackaged memoir of a century-old wooden doll. Many of Field's characters, destinations, and phrases remain intact, and Wells does an admirable job of matching her voice. Hitty's story still begins with a peddler's carved gift for a sea captain's daughter and concludes with the doll's anticipation of future adventures as she views an airplane. Much, however, has changed. Wells shortens the chapters, edits the wordiness, omits the black dialect, and changes the South Sea "Injuns" to "Islanders," with the overall effect of a quickened pace and heightened action. She departs completely from the original after the outbreak of the Civil War. Hitty is now mailed south of the Mason-Dixon line and encounters her first violence when the post office blows up. Jeffers's full-page gouache paintings and the smaller details carry much of the meaning, portraying with dramatic perspective the danger of a storm at sea or using architecture, flora, and fauna to create locale. The generous use of space between lines of text, the sheen of the creamy paper, and the oversized format lend luxury to the telling. Hitty is in good hands for the next 100 years.
Wendy Lukehart, Dauphin County Library, Harrisburg, PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Field's 1930 Newbery Medal-winning classic about a doll with a taste for adventure gets resized, relocated and redecorated in this handsome storybook adaptation. As in Field's version, this Hitty begins her memoirs in 1829 Maine as an old peddler carves her out of a piece of mountain ash from Kilkenny, Ireland. Mountain-ash wood, Hitty confides, is said to bring luck and to have "power against mischief"; indeed, as Hitty travels from owner to owner, she emerges from some precarious spots (a shipwreck in the South Seas, a gutter in Bombay). Wells adjusts the prose for '90s sensibilities (e.g., there are no longer any "heathens" or "savages," and whaling is said to "seem cruel and heartless, [but] at the time it was necessary. She parts company with Field altogether in creating different adventures for Hitty: her Hitty goes South during the Civil War, crosses paths with a freed slave and, many episodes later, ends up not in a shop, awaiting new destinations (as in the original), but as the prize possession of that former slave's granddaughter. Jeffers (who with Wells reprised Lassie Come Home) will surely captivate readers of all ages with her lustrous color art. Loosely reminiscent of early-20th-century illustrators like Jessie Willcox Smith, Jeffers's paintings have an appropriately nostalgic feel. The large trim size, elegant design and a layout that offers illustrations on every page add to a volume that is as charming as its subject. Ages 6-12. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0689817169
• ISBN 13: 9780689817168
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Susan Jeffers
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112