Publisher's Weekly Review
Using the lives of three real children who traveled on the Mayflower and lived in the Plymouth Colony--Mary, Remember and Bartholomew Allerton--Harness focuses on their experiences and ``adventures during one year, between the autumns of 1620 and 1621.'' She surrounds their story with the larger one of the Pilgrims' struggle for religious freedom and human survival, and invests these figures from the past with a vitality and accessibility that transcend the customary seasonal emphases. This is no sanitized interpretation: the death of the children's mother and her new baby is included, as are the illnesses and deaths of many of the other ``Saints''--Pilgrims--and ``strangers''--non-religious members of the settlement party. Nor is the historical information here confined to the well-paced, involving text; equally effective are the carefully researched watercolor, gouache and colored pencil paintings--possessed of a suitable rusticity, they expand the narrative with dramatic intensity. A generous inclusion of diagrams, charts and maps abounds with the kind of details and labels capable of mesmerizing youngsters for hours. This notable blend of fact and fiction deserves year-round popularity. Ages 5-10. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
A fictionalized account of the founding of Plimoth Plantation, as seen through the eyes of three children who came to the New World on the 'Mayflower', is packed full of interesting tidbits of information. Unfortunately, the main narrative is choppily written and sketchy, as well as less-than-effectively presented -- the reader doesn't learn until the end, for example, that one of the chidren, Mary Allerton, was the last survivor of the original voyage of the 'Mayflower'. Bib. From HORN BOOK 1992, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Mary, Remember, and Bartholomew Allerton were among the youngest on the Mayflower's first voyage; the words here tell how, with the other newcomers, they suffer tremendous losses but gradually come to view Plymouth as home. Meanwhile, the author's paintings expand considerably on the text with a fanciful map of the journey, a cutaway view of the ship, and crowd scenes of planting, harvest, and thanksgiving. The children, introduced in the first paragraph, don't appear in the illustrations, and are not the focus of any picture, until well into the book. The ongoing disparity between text and art is unsettling; moreover, the text is often clumsy: After the death of Mary--last of the original group--the narrative leaps back to a confusing, incomplete explanation of the Pilgrims' origins. The panoramic watercolors are attractive, with expertly composed, cinematic scenes, but the text, pursuing its separate agenda, regrettably never catches up. (Picture book. 6-9)
Booklist Review
Gr. 3-5, younger for reading aloud. This unusual picture book tells a fictional story about three real children who sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower. The story of Bartholomew, Remember, and Mary Allerton begins on board ship just before land is sighted and glances from scene to scene like a skipping stone, alternating their personal story with information about the colony. The wedding of Priscilla Mullins and John Alden, the harvest, and, of course, the Thanksgiving feast, where the children and their father reflect on why they came and whether they are happy, are among the events chronicled. The story itself is followed by two pages summing up the decades of events in the colony and in the family until Mary's death in 1699. Further pages include information, events, and time lines about the Saints (the Pilgrims), the Strangers (everyone else on the Mayflower), the Indians, and other voyages to the New World, as well as a bibliography. In an attempt to keep the story trim, Harness leaves out (or puts on concluding pages) background information that young children may need to figure out what's going on. At the same time, the illustrated back pages are so dense with information ("Around the time of the Pilgrims . . . Opera was being invented in Italy where Galileo had discovered 4 moons of Jupiter") that few readers at this level will be able to take it all in. Still, Harness' appealing watercolor artwork makes this one of the more attractive books on the Pilgrims, and the amount of information it offers can be a plus if an adult is around to help sort it out. Moreover, there are many ways in which the book can be used, so some libraries may want to have more than one copy on hand come November. ~--Carolyn Phelan
