My Father Is Taller than a Tree (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- My Father Is Taller than a Tree
In a departure from his usual work in folklore and fiction, prolific author Bruchac has penned a picture-book tribute to the relationship between fathers and sons. Each double-page spread features a different father-son set and a couplet describing their interactions or activities, e.g. "We walk together in the park/I hold his hand when it gets dark"; "Pop doesn't need to buy me stuff./Just being with him is enough." The featured families are ethnically and racially diverse, and the illustrations depict landmarks from across the United States, adding an additional geographic diversity. Unfortunately, the verses themselves are disappointing in the extreme; they're jingly, sing-song, and forced, and the sentiments are blandly sweet. Halperin's colored-pencil illustrations are somewhat more successful, capturing the love and affection the text doesn't really manage to evoke. Her usual multipaneled style here involves a double-spread landscape view across the top half of the spread, supported by a quartet of smaller panels underneath, and the result is a peek into quotidian, if somewhat idealized, realities with which young viewers will likely identify. While some fathers and sons may find the topic enough to justify this for an end-of-day snuggle, gift-buyers looking for something with textual soundness would be better off turning to Ritchie's Me and My Dad! or Steptoe's In Daddy's Arms I Am Tall (BCCB 2/98) for the father-son pairs in their lives. [End Page 327]
