By Ann McGovern
Every question a six-year-old actually has about the Mayflower, answered on the page where they asked it.
Not a story. A list of the questions a small child would ask, each with the real answer underneath. Where did you sleep? Did you take a bath? Were there other children? What did you do all day for sixty-six days? Was anybody sick? Did you have a toilet? Where did your dog sleep? The answers are specific and often startling, because the truth about the Mayflower is that a hundred and two people spent two months in a space about the size of a classroom with the animals, and the ship was never meant to carry passengers at all. There is a cutaway drawing of the whole ship that a child will lie on the floor with for twenty minutes. It is the shortest, plainest way into 1620 that exists for this age, and it takes an afternoon.
The question-and-answer shape is the whole trick and it is a good one. A child can open it at any page, get a whole complete thing in four sentences, and shut it, which means a six-year-old who will not sit for a chapter will sit for this. It also happens to be the right shape for the subject, because what a small child wants to know about the Mayflower is not why the Pilgrims left England, it is whether they were allowed to bring their cat. Answer that and the bigger question walks in behind it. This is also the youngest book on this shelf by some distance, so it is the one to hand the small one while an older child is deep in something heavier about the same year.