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Title: My Great-Aunt Arizona Written by Gloria Houston Illustrated by Susan Condie Lamb Published by Harper Collins, 1992 Ages: 5-8 Themes: teaching, Appalachian region, biography, generations Opening Lines: My great-aunt Arizona                   … Continue reading →

By Nicki Richesin, The Children’s Book Review
Published: August 26, 2011

Miss Dorothy and Her Bookmobile

By Gloria Houston (Author), Susan Condie Lamb (Illustrator)

Reading level: Ages 6 and up

Hardcover: 32 pages

Publisher: HarperCollins (January 25, 2011)

Source: Publisher

Gloria Houston, author of the timeless classic THE YEAR OF THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS TREE, has created another winner with her latest MISS DOROTHY AND HER BOOKMOBILE.  Based on the true story of Houston’s beloved childhood librarian Dorothy Thomas, this is a touching tribute to how generously Thomas shared her great love of books with generations of life-long readers. Miss Dorothy has high hopes of becoming a respected librarian in a red brick building in her town square. She works hard to realize her goal, but when she falls in love with a man who wants to move to a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, she must find a way to fashion a new dream for herself. In her trusty green bookmobile, Miss Dorothy travels over three countryside counties to deliver books to folks too far away to collect them including a wheelchair-bound child and a host of other grateful readers. In the end, a small white cottage is donated to house the many books Miss Dorothy has collected over the years. Susan Condie Lamb’s glowing pastel illustrations of the “land of high blue mountains, with deep green valleys, and cascading streams splashing silver” bring the story to life. The warm sense of community and the way in which Miss Dorothy’s dream turns into something richer than she imagined makes this a wonderfully instructive and heartfelt book for all ages.

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Nicki Richesin is the editor of four anthologies,What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing Up, Holding On To, and Letting Go of Their Daughters; Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond; the forthcoming Crush: 26 Real-Life Tales of First Love; and The May Queen: Women on Life, Work, and Pulling it all Together in your Thirties. Her anthologies have been excerpted and praised in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle,The Boston Globe, Redbook,