Liberty's Journey - Softcover

Kindergarten-Grade 3–Lady Liberty takes a stroll across America in search of the immigrants who passed by her on their way to other parts of the country. She ends up in San Francisco, but she is lonely for Manhattan: "She missed her home, where hope was born." New Yorkers, in turn, send a sack full of mail imploring the Lady to come back. Overjoyed, she arrives home to a ticker-tape welcome. This disappointing story in verse takes its stiff heroine through farmlands, desert, and cattle country–"her joy renewed by distant places/filled with children's hopeful faces." While Egielski's warm and vibrant illustrations depict Lady Liberty as an involved and humanlike participant in the lives of the people she meets, the text fails to establish her as anything more than an enormous silent statue who is out of place. She never reacts to the people she meets on her journey, and merely stares with a kind look upon seeing old and new immigrants. The whole plot just doesn't make much sense.–Jane Barrer, Washington Square Village Creative Steps, New York City
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Gr. 1-2. In this sentimental, rhyming paean to Lady Liberty, the 151-foot-tall Manhattan statue yearns to breathe free, so she hops off her pedestal in search of amber waves of grain. Traveling west to San Francisco, she is renewed by the sights and sounds, but distraught New Yorkers concoct a plan to lure their Lady back. After a boy brings her a bag of letters imploring her to come home, she plods back through the fruited plains to a cheering crowd of New Yorkers. The singsong verse is uninventive ("But one day, Lady Liberty / wished that she could roam and see / the people who had come and gone; / the land they built their dreams upon"), but the fanciful notion of the statue coming to life and tromping around America like a lost giant will no doubt appeal to readers. Egielski's paintings effectively infuse emotion into the silent statue, and the soft American landscapes are as dreamily nostalgic as the story. An author's note in the back offers a brief history of sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi's larger-than-life monument. Karin Snelson
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