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  • Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend
  • Deborah Stevenson
Watt, Mélanie Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend; written and illus. by Mélanie Watt. Kids Can, 200732p ISBN 1-55453-181-0$14.95 R* Gr. 2-4

"My unfortunate uncle John Wilkes Booth died when I was three years old. I remember nothing of him." That may be Edwina Booth's stock answer to prying acquaintances, but she is well aware the entire family dynamic is affected by relationship to Lincoln's assassin. Narrator Edwina, now of marriageable age, is therefore grateful for a suitor who can accept her as a person apart from her notorious uncle, and she enters into an engagement with Downing Vaux, son of a prominent architect. But when Vaux suffers a breakdown and is later supplanted in her affections by Ignatius Grossmann, she slowly comes to realize that the truly controlling figure in the family is her father, actor Edwin Booth, who governs his daughter with an iron hand in a velvet glove, relying on her to support him on tour and through the dark moods that periodically threaten his career. Edwina's voice is coolly formal and her attitude toward her suitors dispassionate, but the real star of this show is Edwin Booth; Wemmlinger, an expert in nineteenth-century theater, presents him through Edwina's eyes as a loving but manipulative man for whom any publicity is good publicity: "Edwin's a tragedian. Being connected to a national tragedy in life helped him more than any publicity ever could. A burden, perhaps, but much of it is his choice." Though Edwina's a little overshadowed in her own story, the book's take on this larger-than-life family is a fascinating counterpoint to James Cross Giblin's Good Brother, Bad Brother (BCCB 6/05).

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