On holidays, Jackie Kennedy told her children that rather than buying presents or cards, they should illustrate a poem to give to family members. Later, these hand-decorated poems were pasted into a special family scrapbook. Now an adult with children of her own, Caroline Kennedy presents A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children, her loving gift to poetry readers of all ages, but especially those young enough to prefer sitting in a loved one’s lap to reading on their own, splashing in puddles to carefully treading the sidewalk and making mud pies to baking the real thing. Though Kennedy selected these poems for children, you’ll find no Dr. Seuss here; this is classic poetry, timeless poetry, great poetry. Both famous and little-known poems by Alexander Pope, Ted Hughes, Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Walt Whitman, and many others are carefully arranged in sections that speak to a child’s view of the world: About Me, That’s So Silly!, Animals, The Seasons, The Seashore, Adventure and Bedtime. Jon J. Muth’s rich watercolors draw the reader in, adding insight and suggesting parallels between poems. A Family of Poems is a collection to be cherished by young readers and savored in the company of the ones they love.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
