Post Card Passages - Hardcover

Joyce, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0939217279 ISBN 13: 9780939217274

Publisher: Peel Productions, 1994

Synopsis

Great-aunt Gladys sends postcards from her travels to young Susan, who is inspired to work and dream and save until she too can travel around the world

About this title

From School Library Journal:

Grade 1-3-A young girl's great aunt is always going to far away places, and she regularly writes home to the family. This is the story, told in a series of brief post-card communications between Great-Aunt Gladys and Suellan, and interspersed with the child's "diary" entries designed to clarify certain points. These cards have made a great impression on the child, awakening in her a desire to travel herself; 20 years later she has saved enough to begin her own "round-the-world trip." Young Suellan is not a particularly interesting or substantial character. Her only distinctive features are her determination to travel and her insistence on changing her name to Susan because a teacher always mispronounces it. The message, that dreams can come true, is an admirable if not particularly original one. The illustrations, a colorful collage of drawings, photographs, and post-card images, give snapshot impressions of a variety of places clearly intended to whet the appetite for travel. The question is whether children lacking more of a frame of reference than the spare text offers will know what to make of it all. An additional purchase.
Linda Greengrass, Bank Street College Library, New York City
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

From her childhood in the early 1950s until she embarks on her own journeys in 1967, Susan receives postcards from Great-Aunt Gladys, an inveterate world traveler. The girl responds in notes sent to Gladys's Oklahoma home--and, in her diary, she records her dream of someday touring the globe ("Tonight I'm going to sleep with the post card on my heart and imagine it is a magic carpet that will fly me over the mountains and across the seas to England"). The correspondence and Susan's diary entries are superimposed against a background of child-like art and postcard photos--some intentionally blurred. Occasionally presented in collage format, the pictures offer glimpses of many alluring sites. However, a good number of the photos are of Gladys; like amateur slide shows, they have only limited appeal. Similarly, the older woman's descriptions of her travels lack the youthful, personal perspectives found in more vibrant travelogues for children, among them Anni Axworthy's recent Anni's Diary of France . Ages 8-up.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peel Productions
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0939217279
• ISBN 13: 9780939217274
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Dubosque Doug