Customer Reviews

Thomas Jefferson's Feast (Step into Reading) (Step #4)

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This is a wonderful children's book about our third president (US). It provides a fun story about how he loved to read and write and eat! He brought foods back from France that weren't popular here and made them famous. Jefferson got people to finally try love apples or tomatos, thought to be poisonous here in the US, but eaten often in France.

This book (and many others like it) have been a great find for my family. I am homeschooling a second-grader and these books have been the key to getting him interested in reading, and have become the foundation of our reading curriculum this year. Since we are studying American history, they are relevant, fun, and are about topics to which he can relate. His interest in both reading and history has increased, and he can't wait to get to the next book. At this point level 3 readers are easy for him, level 4 readers are just hard enough to be a challenge (but not too much) and level 5 readers will be tackled in the spring.

Thomas Jefferson's Feast is great because you get to know the everyday T.J. and things that he liked. We found out that he was responsible for introducing things to this continent that we really love such as tomatoes and macaroni and cheese. My son loved the story.

This book is great paired up with "A Prairie Dog for the President" about the Lewis and Clark expedition.

All of the books in this series take one personality trait of a famous person and talk about it. The trait they chose for Jefferson was that he liked to eat. The fact that the "feast" happened over several parties as opposed to one meal is not an important enough piece of "fiction" to justify saying that the book is bad. The book does not talk about Slavery. That is covered in the book about Harriett Tubman, which is also a very good book. This is a Step Into Reading book, not a complete history of Thomas Jefferson book. Although the reading level is 2nd - 4th grade, the content is PreK - 1st.

My 6 year old daughter LOVES stories about historical people and happenings. It is shockingly difficult to find books that are suitable for her age and not about sports figures. This book is not a great literary classic, but it is wonderful because it is smartly written with facts and stories about Thomas Jefferson that are interesting and informative. Not only did my daughter love this book, but I learned quite a bit from it as well.

There are enough facts about Thomas Jefferson to easily fill a book hundreds of pages in length. So why, a reader might wonder, would an author choose to even partially fictionalize a 48-page-long children's book. Six pages are filled with specific information about a feast that did not take place, and although clarified in the author's note, it seems that young children are unlikely to distinguish fact from fiction in a biographical book. Additionally, the idea of a man who owned 100-200 slaves at any given time preparing an entire feast by himself is nonsensical. Only two pages portray slaves: one shows a smiling man at the door of a dumbwaiter; another, two small figures working the land. Their almost-absence, when recounting the life of a man whose existence depended so heavily on their labor, borders on revisionism. The illustrations are very good; the factual parts of the story are excellent; and the inclusion of several French words, complete with meanings and pronunciation, is a bonus; but the truth is overly bent. Abe Lincoln's Hat by Martha Brenner, another in the Step Into Reading series, is equally good, but all true.