Happy Birthday, America!
by Marsha Wilson Chall
(Check Catalog)

From picnics and parades to fireworks and balloons, this lively book with bright illustrations captures the excitement and thrills of a Fourth of July celebration in an all-American town. Joined by an army of aunts, uncles, and cousins, eight-year-old Kay and her family celebrate the Fourth of July.

Booklist Reviews

Ages 5-7. Relatives arrive in dizzying bunches for a small-town family's glorious Fourth of July. Seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old narrator, the traditions are both fresh and familiar: reunion hugs and kisses; casseroles and red-white-and-blue jello on bowls on long tables set up on spacious lawns; children marching with the floats and fire trucks down Main Street; a post-picnic plunge off the dock; fireworks over the lake after sunset, followed by waving sparklers from the shore. In broadly focused, slightly hazy paintings, Porfirio parades gaggles of laughing aunts, uncles, and cousins over wide, well-kept, very green landscapes. Even more than Barbara Joosse's Fourth of July (1985), illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully, or Wendy Watson's Hurray for the Fourth of July (1992), this idealized celebration captures the joy and solemnity of the holiday. A final happy birthday wish shouted across the dark lake brings voices from the far shore: "I hear them all around me, wishes to us, wishes to them, wishes to everyone." ((Reviewed May 1, 2000))Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews