The Long, Long Letter - Hardcover

Elizabeth Spurr

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786801271 ISBN 13: 9780786801275

Publisher: Hyperion, 1996

Synopsis

Mother's long, long letter brings Aunt Hetta surprise and adventure, as the loose pages bury her house and keep her warm during the winter

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Not for the timid, this tall tale teasingly tests its audience's tolerance for wordplay. Through rain and sleet and dark of night, lonely Aunt Hetta stands vigil by her mailbox, which holds nothing but cobwebs (one of Catrow's typically eccentric spreads portrays her as a watchful hawk perched on the empty canister). Fortunately, Hetta's sister is busy writing to Hetta, composing a dispatch that fills several crates ("It was a long, long letter"). A sudden whirlwind rips the tops of the crates and scatters the pages ("It was an all-gone letter"). Months go by: "It was a lone, lone Hetta." Finally, a passing storm delivers the pages via "air mail" to their destination, blanketing Hetta and her yard, and Hetta becomes "a ce-leb-ri-ty, instead of a non-entity." Spurr's (The Gumdrop Tree) narrative offers a playful but bumpy ride. Even linguistic veterans will need several read-throughs to acquaint themselves with the loop-de-looping rhythms, and some devices, like the unnecessary hyphens in "ce-leb-ri-ty," are used inconsistently, suggesting an experiment gone awry. Spurr's tongue-twisters, meanwhile, pose a formidable challenge ("Where was the missive from her sister? How could it have missed her?")-happily, it's a type of challenge young readers love. Catrow's illustrations bubble with detail yet are not as studied as those in She's Wearing a Dead Bird on Her Head! A horse pulls a mail cart and postal rates are just 20 cents a pound, yet bulldozers shovel Hetta's "blizzard" of pages and a boy's toy sportscar rests on a lawn-his is a world as topsy-turvy as the text. Ages 4-8.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Aunt Hetta is lonely. She lives too far from town for friends, and her kith and kin haven't written. By her mailbox she pines, then fires off a postcard to her sister. ``Have you quite forgotten me?'' suggests Hetta, ladling on the guilt. So the sister spends a year penning a long letter that requires a thousand stamps to post: ``She wrote of cabbages and crocuses, sausages and shoes. The newly born, the price of corn, the cranking phone she'd never use.'' As the massive missive is being trundled to its destination, a fierce wind blows the pages skyward. Now airmail, the letter falls to earth like snow, burying Hetta. The whole town turns out to rescue her from the storm of words and Hetta gains a gaggle of new friends. Spurr (The Gumdrop Tree, 1994, etc.) lets the sister's son narrate this paean to the lost art of letter writing in a rollicking, tongue-in-cheek style. Catrow teases the story for all its humor, at one point turning Hetta into a raptor as she keeps ``a hawk's watch'' on her letterbox. A jolly tall tale. (Picture book. 4-8) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0786801271
• ISBN 13: 9780786801275
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: David Catrow