About the Author:
Jane Kurtz was born in Portland, Oregon, but when she was two years old, her parents decided to move to Ethiopia, where she spent most of her childhood. Jane speaks about being an author at schools and conferences—in all but eleven of the United States, so far, and such places as Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, France, Germany, Romania, England, Indonesia, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Japan. She helped start Ethiopia Reads (EthiopiaReads.org), a nonprofit that is planting the first libraries for children in Ethiopia. She is the author of many books for children.
From School Library Journal:
PreSchool-Grade 1–With a choppy narrative and an illogical flow of events, this book is likely to confuse beginning readers. For example, Johnny trades his seedlings for a pan, a ham, a shirt, and some dirt. The fact that apples eventually grow from these "baby" trees is not mentioned. A few pages later, Johnny abruptly "hands something shiny/to a hopping girl" who suddenly appears pictured in his arms holding an apple. Next, farmers enter the story: "At the end of the day/they can come inside/and bite into an apple/or a sweet apple pie." Youngsters must infer that fruit comes from Johnny's aforementioned trees, and not from the labor of the farmer's plows. Haverfield's watercolor illustrations depict golden scenes and a Caucasian cast of characters. Stick with versions of this tale by Patricia Demuth (Grosset & Dunlap, 1996) and Gwenyth Swain (Carolrhoda, 2001), books for beginning readers that are a bit more challenging but have longer formats that offer increased description and vocabulary to yield flowing narratives with contextual predictability.–Laura Scott, Farmington Community Library, MI
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