Washday by Eve Bunting (review)

Lizzie’s mother is having a baby, which means Lizzie must forego a tea party with her friend to help her grandmother wash clothes. Their frontier life means this is a hard day’s work: there is water to haul and to boil, homemade soap to shave, and stained clothes to run up and down the washboard before putting them through the wringer and hanging them to dry. Fortunately, her grandmother’s affection makes the task less tiresome, and there is a cold glass of buttermilk awaiting Lizzie at the end, as well as a surprise tea party. Bunting and Sneed temper the tedious details of the washday process with quiet prose and gentle pencil and watercolor drawings, and the soft lines of the illustrations, hued in blues and greens, make the arduousness of the task more palatable. Lizzie’s Blythe-doll eyes, however, render her woebegone and even unnerving, and the faces are occasionally strained; the story’s pacing verges on the languorous, resulting in a rather unmemorable, though not unpleasant, audience experience. Still, the portrayal of frontier life and sweet details may fare well among those young audiences on the threshold of Little House in the Big Woods and other pioneering tales.