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| Like
The Sky Was Blue, Charlotte here uses the medium of a little girl looking
at family photographs to discover where she fits into the life of her family,
which began before she did with her mother, "this quiet lady," who
also grew from being a "baby smiling in her bassinette" and a
"curly-haired little girl / with the doll drooping from her hand."
While The Sky Was Blue goes back several generations and explores
"... important things (which) will always be the same,"
This Quiet
Lady follows the personal history of a mother
as seen through the loving, informed and attentive eyes of her daughter. |
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| This Quiet Lady was edited by
Susan Hirschman
and has bold, bright gorgeous illustrations, lushly colored, with an American
primitive flavor by Anita Lobel (Cover pictured above). And if you'd like
to look at where Charlotte, like the character in the book who looks at her
pregnant mother and her own very first baby pictures, "begins", click
to CZ's Family Album. |
| The
Sky Was Blue, published in 1963, has what now looks like very old-fashioned
illustrations by Garth Williams, soft and muted.
This Quiet Lady was
published in 1992, almost thirty years later. What do you think happened in
Charlotte's life to alter her point of view? What happened in the world? What
happened in the kind of art used in children's books? What do you understand
about your history when you look at family photographs? (To
the right, a very battered copy of the cover of The
Sky Was Blue.) |
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