Waving

by Peter Sís

Book Overview

Mary's mother waved for a taxi. Two bicyclists waved back at her. Three boys waved at the bicyclists . . . and so on, until fifteen taxi drivers wave at everybody waving at them. A fresh and funny... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Library Binding
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688071600
• ISBN13: 9780688071608
• Release Date: April 1988
• Publisher: Greenwillow Books
• Length: 28 Pages
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

High fives

WAVING is the first adventure in the Mary trilogy by Peter Sis. As in the sequels GOING UP! and BEACH BALL, there is a signature appearance for Greenwillow publisher, this time on a bicyclist's green banner. Along with GOING UP! and KOMODO!, the duller colors of daily life backdrop the watercolor magic of dreams.With his hallmark humor, the author/illustrator names two big city restaurants Five Little Pigs and Seven Dwarfs, for storytelling favorites; Mary's residence Home Sweet Home; and the last business The End grocery store. In a plug for his adopted 'burb, he sketches a big apple in one of the first store fronts. The very last building has a welcome mat and the initials PS for an address, with perhaps the writer holding a book and looking out an upper window. As in the book AN OCEAN WORLD, where the letters PS also appear obviously within the pages, the storyteller lets us know that all this might have happened because he might have been there, too.In WAVING, the pen and ink drawings are whimsically more audacious than the surprisingly more conventional, yet delightful watercolors. So the author/artist draws how Mary's route looks on the introductory pages and then sketches what the little girl adds, to the block and the street, while flatfooting it back home. Along the way, the appropriate numbers of baby chicks, books, cakes, cups, eggs, fish, hats, left and right handed waving passersby, and trees get her past each numbered address.Although Mary's mother wears a Princess Diana style work attire in red and white polka dots, other females appear as Girl Scouts, joggers, passengers and tourists. This might suggest other activities that the mother and daughter share. It might also tell us about the deeply loving mother-child interaction evident throughout KOMODO!, the Matt quartet and the Mary trilogy. Mary might be at that bonding and imprinting stage in which the only woman in the world for her is her mother, as seen by copied facial expressions, hairstyle, and shoes. So why not interpret the unsuccessfully flagged down cab driver as a friendly chain reaction (beginning and ending with taxis) that only her mother can start? Therefore, the male working world she conjures mostly in distant grey might express mild curiosity as to what Daddy does, while, secure in her mother's more present love at this stage, she does not yet ask with Dolores Johnson, WHAT WILL MOMMY DO WHEN I'M AT SCHOOL?