Houghton Mifflin Reading: The Nation's Choice: Theme Paperbacks, On-Level Grade 4 Theme 2 - Sarah Plain and Tall

by Patricia MacLachlan

Book Overview

This beloved Newbery Medal-winning book is the first of five books in Patricia MacLachlan's chapter book series about the Witting family.Set in the late nineteenth century and told from young Anna's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618062416
• ISBN13: 9780618062416
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Age Range: 6 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 1

Customer Reviews

A Must Read

This book is a classic and is wonderfull. A must read for any fans of Little House and Laura Ingalls. Shows you another part cross section of early American life. They did a surprisingly good movie also!

Great Newberry Award Winning Book

What a wonderful book for children! We couldn't put it down. The author has a way with words that make you feel as though you're right there on the farm with Jacob, Sarah and the kids. Please purchase this and pass it down to your grandchildren!

A Small Book with a Big Heart

Caleb and Annie are two young children who have had no mother for several years. Then one day, Sarah, a lady from Maine, answers an advertisement their father, Jacob, put in a newspaper, giving new hope to the family of three. Will she be the one to fill the emptiness in their hearts and the silence in their home, at last?Some adjustments _will_ have to be made first. Sarah has to get used to living away from the ocean that she has known and loved all her life. Jacob has to get used to having a headstrong wife who is just as good at carpentry as he is. The children have to get used to a new and unorthodox mother. Yet their hope that everything will work out always shines through."Sarah, Plain and Tall" is a story about people learning to live together and become a family simply because they've grown to love each other. It is also about seeing both new things with old eyes and old things with new eyes. The reader will enjoy this short, joy-filled period in the lives of these characters, whether they are learning how to swim, sliding down haystacks, or tossing cut hair to birds.Patricia MacLachlan uses very simple language, which only highlights her poet's gift of saying volumes and painting landscapes with a few well-chosen words. The images in the novel are as potent as images in poetry, even though everything is in prose. Every last word is meaningful.I need only think of "Sarah, Plain and Tall" to remember that sometimes the simplest children's stories are the best.