Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House, reads to her grandchildren. Other women world leaders in Europe, Africa, and Asia are grandmother-readers.
What better way to insure the widespread commemoration of Lincoln's birthday than to organize a circle of grandmother-readers? We can also enlist honorary grandmothers for those who seek to draw closer to children.
We hope that public libraries will encourage grandmother-readers. An anonymous donor will present the best newly published Lincoln story and picture books to all grandmothers. Just email us and we will donate a book to a library of your choice.
Previously we reviewed Staton Rabin's Mr. Lincoln’s Boys. Another beautiful and appealing book to be published in January by Candlewick Press is Rosemary Wells’ Lincoln and His Boys.
Wells expresses her indebtedness to Catherine Clinton, a leading Civil War historian and Mary Lincoln biographer, and to Harold Holzer, editor of Lincoln as I Knew Him. Wells writes of Willie Lincoln's 200-word fragment about life in the White House. This moving and empathetic story is based in historical fact – a trip to Chicago to meet politicians, buying gifts for family members including gloves for Mary, the train trip from Springfield to Washington, Willie's death and his parents inconsolable grief, Tad's visits to the war front, barging into meetings with a pet goat. And best of all, when the victory is realized, the family travels to Richmond on the steamboat River Queen. The President asks the bandmaster to play Dixie as a message. For the victors and the vanquished Reconciliation and Reconstruction will go hand in hand.
Wells notes that Lincoln was ahead of his time in many ways and especially so as a patient, sharing, and generous father.
The book is listed as appropriate for readers in grades 3-7. But grandmothers can stretch those years to make it a story for all ages.
