By Karen Hesse
Three days of city heat, and then it rains, and everybody's mother comes out and dances in it.
Tessie is up on the porch in a heat that has flattened everything. Mamma is bent over the parched vine, sagging. The street is gray and the sky is gray and the whole block is holding still. Then Tessie sees it: a purple-black cloud way off, coming. She hunts down Jackie-Joyce and Liz and Rosemary, they get into their swimsuits behind closed doors, and they stand out in the alley waiting. And it comes. It comes down and the street steams and the four of them are shrieking and stamping in it, and then the door opens and Mamma comes out, and Miz Glick, and Jackie-Joyce's mother, and the mothers dance in the rain in their good clothes with their hair going flat.
Hesse is a poet writing prose and she never once reaches for a fancy word. Mamma sags. The sky is the color of a plum. Tessie is thin as a licorice stick. The verbs do all the work, and they are all verbs a nine-year-old already owns, which is why this book makes children write better instead of making them feel outclassed. Muth's watercolors run and pool and let the paper show through, so the pictures get wetter as the book does. And underneath the language it is a happy book — nothing is wrong and nothing gets fixed, everyone is just hot and then they are not.