Customer Reviews

At Ellis Island: A History in Many Voices

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This book is the perfect addition to a teacher's toolbox for teaching about immigration. It contains a fiction story, original sources and a reflection of someone visiting Ellis Island today--all on the same page. The information is easy to follow and stimulating to all kinds of discussion. Dr. Peacock is a master storyteller and a wonderful historian. There are so many uses for this book. When I think of all the names engraved on the walls at Ellis Island I can only imagine each descendant would love a copy of this book. And--the book itself is beautiful. The paintings are stunning and the photographs grab the reader. This book is destined to become the standard for books about Ellis Island.

I read this book to my daughter's third grade class as they learned about Ellis Island. I cried reading about this small girl traveling to America all alone. I think it was valuable for them to see what people were willing to do 100 years ago to find a better life for their children

Part story of a fictional immigrant girl (Sera), part personal reminiscence by the author, and part quotations from other (real) child immigrants. This book is for older kids - the children portrayed in this book have experienced wartime atrocities and desperate times.

Sera is fleeing Turkey, where blood runs in the streets and her mother was murdered, to join her father in America.

Every page has a section in script type of Sera telling/praying the story of her emigration to her mother. The pages also feature block quotations from immigrant children's accounts or memoirs, with their names and ages. Most pages also contain a block in red type that are the author's personal observations... those seem anachronistic and out of place on the pages, interrupting the story and setting up a strange sense of present-time clashing with the past. It was hard to follow, reading it with my kids.

Great photographs, beautiful illustrations, and very sad and haunting retelling of the challenges these child immigrants faced.

My grandmother immigrated to America as a child - this gives good context. It's an interesting beginning to the conversation of how socialism and social unrest led to wholesale slaughter in Europe.