A Safe Place. This item is unavailable.A Safe Place

Emily remembers the bad times in her past when her mother and father would fight and she would hear her mother being hit, so when she arrives at her new home with her mother, she is fearful, until she sees she gets support from other children just like her.

PreSchool-Grade 3. Emily recalls her father's abusive behavior (yelling pictured, and hitting and broken arm alluded to) that has brought her and her mother to a shelter for battered women and their children. Children play, talk out disagreements rather than hit, and plant bulbs so that in the spring the flowers will "make us think of the kids and their mothers who have come here and gone away to start a new life." The facile but reassuring story tells youngsters that there are safe places, that it is all right to be frightened, and that things work out. (At the story's conclusion, Emily and her mother are on the way to an apartment, a new school, and a new job for the mother.) Graphite drawings show a clean and comforting shelter, warm supportive adult women, and a multicultural population.?Susan Hepler, Alexandria City Public Schools, VA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ages 5-8. The "safe place" of the title is the "big white house on the hill" where Emily and Mama go during the middle of the night to escape from Daddy. This simply written concept book does a commendable job of maintaining the child's perspective about an abusive parent: "She [Emily] had tried to be good, but . . . the fighting didn't stop." The soft pencil drawings evoke the safety and warmth of life at the shelter, where Emily gets to know the other moms and kids, and where she learns that violence is unacceptable: "We don't ever [hit] here. Here we talk it over." This useful book ends on a convincingly hopeful note when--after a considerable stay--Emily and Mama leave the safe house to begin a new life. Julie Corsaro