By Rosalyn Schanzer
Two men named George, one in London and one in Virginia, and the war that neither of them thought he started.
There were two Georges. George Washington, a Virginia planter who grew up wanting to be a British officer, and George III, who came to the British throne at twenty-two and believed the colonies were his to govern. Schanzer puts them on facing pages and walks the same twenty years from both ends. The taxes look like theft from one side and like a fair bill for a war fought on the colonists' behalf from the other. The Boston Tea Party is a protest or a raid on private property, depending which page you're standing on. She draws all of it in bright, busy watercolors full of detail, with speech balloons and real quotes, and she never tells you which George to root for. No cherry trees here, and no ranting mad king either.
Most Revolution books for children won't take the British side seriously, and this one does. Children usually meet this war as the story where the colonists are brave and the king is a tyrant; here George III gets to explain himself, and his reasons come across as actual reasons. The facing-page design does most of the teaching on its own. A child sees the two columns and understands, before you've said anything, that there were two ways to see this. It's browsable, too, so a child who'd never sit down with a straight history book may still pick this one up for the pictures and take in the argument without quite meaning to.