Photographs with brief text chronicle a seven-month stay at a homeless shelter where a ten-year-old girl felt scared at first but later felt safe.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 3?Life in the Cornerstone Community Outreach Center, a shelter for women and children in Chicago, is presented through the eyes of a young girl who has just arrived. Through very simple language; short, declarative sentences; and a montage of photographs presented in quasi-collage format, she offers her impressions of shelter life. The book clearly seeks to demystify and de-stigmatize the experience, and casts as positive a light as possible on the residents. The black-and-white photographs (occasionally tinted) display a diverse population, and many of them show strong emotions as well. For the most part they correspond well to the brief text on each page. A lot of questions, however, remain unanswered. The economic circumstances of the narrator's family, whose belongings are in storage while they wait for a new apartment, remain vague. Despite the superficial nature of the text, the book humanizes and individualizes an aspect of life about which children have many questions and fears and about which there is little appropriate information available. This book has a slightly different focus than Curt and Gita Kaufman's Hotel Boy (Atheneum, 1987).?Linda Greengrass, Bank Street College Library, New York City
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Gr. 3^-5. The trouble and the comfort a child feels in a Chicago homeless shelter is movingly expressed in collage photos and a simple story, based on the experience of a 10-year-old girl. It's not always clear who's who in the pictures, but the truth of the first-person narrative will touch families close to the experience as well as those who want to know about it. The girl talks of her fears, of the crowding and dislocation ("I wish I could have a room of my own" ). She hates the lines at the sinks in the morning; at school she's ashamed to say where she lives. But as the months pass, she feels the support of the shelter community ("like a great big family" ) as she celebrates birthdays and Christmas, attends Girl Scout meetings, and then, finally, helps her mother find her own apartment. We see the pain and believe in the hope of the smiling faces. Part of the book's profits will support the Cornerstone Community Center where the story is set. This book can be paired with Wolf's nonfiction account Homeless. Hazel Rochman
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