Leafy Landmarks

April 1, 2024

Gr 3-7-In this engaging and creative introduction to poetry, Schaub weaves geography, botany, and history throughout the narrative of a family's road trip to historical trees in the United States. Tree leaves flood the endpapers with poetry types and descriptions highlighted on the family's journey. Lambelet's digital art carefully layers the leaves, authentically providing texture and warmth, and the selection of fonts to identify tree species and landmarks suits each spread. "Hit the Road," a quatrain, introduces the leafy adventure with a fantastic map of all the stops and provides opportunities for cross-curricular discovery. Each tree stop includes a poem with its listed form, the location and species of the tree, and a paragraph of information about why the tree is significant. California's General Sherman, Nebraska's Arbor Day Oak, Oklahoma City's Survivor Tree, and the cherry trees of Washington, D.C., are some of the stops. Petrified Forest in Arizona is a study of contrasts and beauty, evoking the past and present through art and prose. Literary devices and forms are varied and the art provides further depth. "The Emancipation Tree" is the only piece that lacks consistency in word choice and framing. Its nonet poem, "Shady Haven," discusses that people were "Slaves no more./ Hopeful./ Free." In the informational text for this tree, it uses "enslaved African Americans" and "slaves." It is an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise impressive book. The family of four is interracial; the father is a man of color, and the mother is light-skinned. VERDICT Recommended for poetry collections, although it is best suited for guided reading.-Rachel Zuffa

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March 1, 2024
Grades 2-5 This fun, informative work uses famous trees and related history to introduce poetry forms. Washington DC's well-known cherry blossom trees are here, as are California's towering redwoods, but so are lesser-known trees, such as the Emancipation Oak in Virginia, where people who were formerly enslaved heard the Emancipation Proclamation, and the "moon tree" in Indiana, which was grown from seeds that visited the moon. An opening spread briefly describes 15 poetry forms from apostrophe ("A poetry form in which the narrator speaks directly to a person, place, idea, or thing") to zeno ("10 lines of verse with the syllable count 8-4-2-1, 4-2-1, 4-2-1"), and the tree on each of the spreads that follow is accompanied by a poem illustrating one of the forms. Throughout, the majesty of the trees, the landscapes they grace, famous figures associated with them, and young visitors who enjoy the trees today are showcased in Lambelet's attractively busy images, in which greens and browns predominate, sprinkled with other muted colors to evoke an arboreal feeling. This will find use in nature and poetry units to great effect.

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