By Kay Winters
The day of the Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1773, told by fifteen ordinary Bostonians who don't all want the same thing to happen.
Ethan is the printer's errand boy, and he has a message to run around Boston: there's a meeting tonight. At every stop, somebody tells you what they think. The baker is a secret Patriot. The milliner wants everyone to pay the tax and stop stirring up trouble. The tavern keeper hears everything. There's a man enslaved by the blacksmith, a Native basket maker selling at the market, a wigmaker, a cooper, a schoolmaster. Each one gets a poem in their own voice, and each one has a job you can smell and hear. By nightfall they're all headed for the same meeting, and out in the harbor three ships sit full of tea. Larry Day's watercolors put you right there in the street with them.
Fifteen voices in forty pages, and your child gets the whole argument without anyone standing up to lecture. It's the rare book that shows the Revolution happening to a whole street instead of to a committee, and it makes plain that the colonists were never one crowd who all agreed. The milliner's contempt for the mob sits three pages from the baker's secret meetings, so the split in the town lands on its own. It reads well in pieces, too: each poem stands alone, so a child who can't sit through a chapter can sit through a single page. And because every voice belongs to a different trade, you come away with a real picture of how colonial people earned their bread.