Customer Reviews

Kildee House (The Newbery Honor Roll)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jerome Kildee is a shy stonecutter who retires to the redwood forest to be alone. He finds, instead, friendship for the first time in his life. Delightfully simple, soothing, and serene, this little book takes the reader into the heart of an unassuming man who finds joy in the animals and children he learns to know; the reader has the sublime opportunity of gaining the friendships Jerome finds in spite of his self-imposed isolation. His quiet ways allow for the local animals and children to invade his space, and that is when the fun begins. Jerome learns to relate to a variety of personalities and resolve the issues in an unusual community of innocence. The descriptions of his little home will charm you enough to want to retreat there. For anyone who enjoys nature and self discovery, Kildee house is a book to savor. I have read Jerome's story about 30 times. I love sharing it with the people I care about because it has never failed to delight and satisfy its new friends.

This is a heartwarming story, very well written, about a man who builds a home on the side of a giant redwood tree. A family of skunks claim the house as their own, and the man is kind to them. Other forest animals visit, as well. The man doesn't have the heart to turn the animals away, nor can he turn away children from two fueding families. My eight year old son loved this book at bedtime. It's a gentle story written decades ago, in a gentler time. Highly recommended.

There was no summary for this book however, if it is the book I read as a child it is a book worth reading. The book I hope it is is about a man building his home in the base of a Giant Sequoia tree. It was a beautifully written book that has remained in my memory for over forty years.

I LOVE having the older Newbery Medal and Honor books available to read aloud to my kids. This book got us through most of the drive home from California to Washington, and it was particularly meaningful because we had done some driving on the Pacific Coast. The story is sweet and charming and doesn't feel obviously contrived. There is problem-solving on a practical level and in relationships. The details about the animals are both realistic and very funny. My only criticism is the sentence structure can seem a little choppy, especially for reading aloud, so sometimes it was better to add conjunctions here are there to smooth out the narrative.