Stacy’s Comments (group member since Dec 25, 2012)

Stacy’s comments from the Classics Without All the Class group.

TWIG
by Elizabeth Orton Jones
Reading Twig was an experience equal to splashing in a rain puddle, wearing red shoes, and munching the first caramel apple of autumn. Nostalgia--wrapped in a book cover. This seventy-year-old, metafictive classic is an enchantingly illustrated novel that transports young (and young-at-heart) readers to a wonderland inside and around an empty tomato can.

“Twig was just a plain, ordinary little girl who lived on the fourth floor of a ‘high sort of house’ in the city. The back yard behind that house was Twig's little world. It was a bare little world, with nothing but a dandelion and a stream of drainpipe water to make it beautiful; with nobody but Old Boy, the ice-wagon horse, Old Girl, the cat, and the Sparrows, to keep Twig company.

But one day, out in the alley, Twig found an empty tomato can, with pictures of bright red tomatoes all round it. When it was upside down, it looked like a pretty little house, just the right size for a fairy! Twig stood it upside down next to the dandelion, not far from the stream. And this is the story of what happened in and around that little house one Saturday afternoon” (Purple House Press, 2002).

Readers leave the miniature world with Twig when at the last possible moment she declines the opportunity to fly off with the fairies. After all, she is just a plain, ordinary girl who hears her mother calling.

Thank you, Purple House Publishers, for reprinting this treasure.