Oranges

Describes the long journey and the combined labor of many people that it takes to bring a single orange from the tree to the table.

PreSchool-K An orange, looking like a setting sun, graces the title page. From the planting of the orange trees, picking the fruit, processing the oranges, packing and shipping them, and selling them in stores to the final stage of eating them, readers are shown that "A world of work is in this ripe orange"and a world of people. People who speak Spanish, Creole, English, and Korean are involved in placing that orange in someone's hand. The constant use of the impersonal "someone" distances readers emotionally from the text. The passive narrative voice combined with static illustrations convey little action and no excitement. The occasional lapses into pretentious language ("I place a section in my mouth and its liquid fibers dissolve on my tongue") also reinforce the text's formality. Szilagyi's illustrations, with her textured pencil strokes, convincing mouth-watering oranges, strong simple shapes, and realistic multi-ethnic characters, are best at creating a mood and fall short when depicting action. Not enough detailed information to qualify as nonfiction and yet too impersonal to be an involving story. Karen K. Radtke, Milwaukee Public Library
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"A world of work / is in this ripe orange that I pry apart," says the girl who narrates this bright, informative book by newcomer Rogow. The brief text traces the path of an orange from the fields which "somebody cleared" to the mouth of the young girl who tastes "its / liquid fibers dissolved on her tongue." Szilagyi's competent colored pencil and watercolors focus like the text on the people who plant, harvest, sort, load, and sell the boxes of oranges. The text sometimes hovers confusingly between the general and the particular: "Some trucker drove the oranges . . . Probably he spoke English . . . Some grocery clerk bagged this one . . . Probably he spoke Korean." A substitution of "perhaps" for "probably" would have made the multicultural dimension of the "world of work" more clear to literal-minded young readers. A Richard Jackson Book. Ages 4-6.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.