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Review by Paula Morgan
Donald Hall's new book "The Milkman's Boy" begins as a simple story about a boy and his horse, but it soon develops into much more. Eleven-year-old Paul Graves works with his family delivering milk from neighborhood farms to people's doorsteps. Like many boys and girls his age, he loves his horse Polly.
Young readers learn what the milk delivery business involved in the early 1900s -- rising at four in the morning to fill glass bottles, pushing paper caps into the bottle tops, loading the wagons, making the rounds.
Time moves on, the suburbs expand, milk deliveries increase and the Graves buy a Model-T, but one sign of the changing times that Paul's father steadily dismisses is pasteurization. Then Paul's little sister Elzira contracts undulant fever. A new medicine called aspirin, available only in Germany, would help, but World War I prohibits its export. Paul and his brother strip the bark from nearby willow trees and their mother boils it to make the remedy that cures Elzira. Finally, their father decides it's time the Graves Dairy bought a pasteurizing machine. As the story concludes, Paul is 14 and delivering milk alone with the help of his favorite horse Polly.
Greg Shed's gold-and-brown-toned paintings are reminiscent of the period. As good book illustrations should, their beauty draws young readers to the carefully written story where they learn of one family's desire to serve their neighbors while battling with change.
Hall, also author of "Ox-Cart Man," for which illustrator Barbara Cooney won the Caldecott Medal in 1980, tells readers in a note about his own family's experience in the dairy business. He also describes the passing of the home delivery business and its tentative comeback as more mothers and fathers work outside the home. The horse, alas, will not make it in our motorized age.
Paula Morgan is a children's book reviewer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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