Customer Reviews

Rhyolite: The True Story of a Ghost Town

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

 

 

This is an interesting, well written, rhyming story about the formation and demise of a town in Neveda in 1904 in response to a gold rush. The woodcut illustrations are beautiful. It is a useful book to teach a child about the concept of a ghost town, something my six year old son, who has been raised on the East Coast and Midwest, had no idea existed.

After I stood and read this book in the Visitor Center at Furnace Creek (Death Valley), I knew I had to go out to Rhyolite and see the ghost town. The exceptional woodcuts by David Frampton evoke the beginning of the 20th century in a Nevada boom town; the coyotes, emblematic of the natural world that cannot be kept at bay by this unnatural town, weave in and out of the story like the haunting refrain of a ballad.
Unlike another reviewer, I found the couplets charming, witty, and not tedious at all. The internal rhymes, alliteration and striking similies (rooms/...like open, sunlit tombs) made the story exceedingly memorable.

What a beautiful book, both in the rhymes that tell a story and in the woodcuts that capture the remains of the Old West: 1904, to be exact, when two miners struck gold and the boomtown of Rhyolite, Nevada, sprang up. Four years later, 10,000 people with all their accoutrements deserted the town in a matter of weeks. Banks failed, businesses went bust, and the desert began its work . . . as the coyotes sensed it would. This is a book worth reading aloud, worth studying for meaning and illustrations. If I'm ever in Nevada, I would want to visit the ghost town of Rhyolite just because of this book.

We ordered and read this after visiting Rhyolite. Really helped explain to the kids what happened there.