Bread Is for Eating - Hardcover

Phillis Gershator is a former librarian and the author of several picture books.

David Gershator is a songwriter and a translator of Spanish poetry. The Gershators live on the island of St. Thomas. Emma Shaw-Smith, a native of Ireland, lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Kindergarten-Grade 3-"No tires el pan,"-Don't throw the bread away! a mother sings to her child. She explains, poetically, how wheat is planted, grown, harvested, milled, and baked to loaves of life-giving bread. A little song, "El pan es para comer" (music included) accompanies each step in the process. Spanish and English are blended seamlessly with the graceful narrative. Shaw-Smith's heroic-style pictures, filled with rich, glowing reds and yellows, are crammed with disparate details. Tiny railroad trains wind through the landscape of fields and mills. Sacks of flour emerge on assembly lines and pop up in country stores. Scenes are packed in the way of gigantic Mexican murals. Endpapers are a patchwork quilt of tiny vignettes-grains and stalks of wheat, dough rising in bowls, loaves of many shapes, slices of pan spread with butter and jam. The miniatures are repeated and expanded in borders on the double-page spreads. These images, vibrating with life and color, are not to be missed.
Ruth Semrau, formerly at Lovejoy School, Allen, TX
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.