![]() ![]() ![]() Kern possessed? Then Lila remembers: It was kindness! Harnessing that memory, Lila now welcomes her own “smiling young faces.” This is a sweet story that emphasizes good cheer, helpfulness, and the importance of feeling welcome and heard, no matter who you are: terrific messages, expressed in bouncy verses that scan well. What was that marvelous, ineffable quality Ms. But then she remembers the teacher who helped her overcome her fears and doubts years earlier. Lila grows up, still fretting sometimes, and then becomes a new teacher who worries upon meeting her own students. Soon, classmates get into the act, and lonely Lila makes friends, emerges from her shell, and learns that “what ifs” have positive sides. ![]() Kern, Lila’s new teacher, invites Lila to erase the chalkboard at recess and to articulate her fears. Entering second grade feels overwhelming: Nothing’s familiar, and she has no friends. 5-8)įrom earliest childhood, Lila Greer, the youngest of five in a single-dad household, has been a worrier. Considering the author’s track record and influences, it may find a welcome from younger audiences too. Short on internal logic but long on creamy scenes of calf and tractor either gamboling energetically with a gaggle of McCloskey-like geese through neutral-toned fields or resting peacefully in the shade of a gnarled tree (apple, not cork), the episode will certainly draw nostalgic adults. After the big new yellow tractor, crowds of overalls-clad locals and a red fire engine all fail to pull her out, the little tractor (who had been left behind the barn to rust after the arrival of the new tractor) comes putt-puff-puttedy-chuff-ing down the hill to entice his terrified bovine buddy successfully back to dry ground. Continuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long ( The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud. ![]()
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