Madlenka [Paperback]

A trip around a city block is like a trip around the world!

Peeking out through a die-cut window on the jacket, Madlenka invites the reader to enter her world. And what a world it is! On the surface, it looks like an ordinary city block, but as we meet Madlenka's neighbors -- the French baker, the Indian news vendor, the Italian ice-cream man, the Latin American grocer, a retired opera singer from Germany, an African American school friend, and the Asian shopkeeper -- and look through die-cut windows to the images and memories they have carried from old country to new, we can see that Madlenka's block is as richly varied as its inhabitants. And why is Madlenka going around the block, jumping for joy? Her tooth is loose, and she wants everyone to know!

Madlenkais a 2000 New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of the Year. This title has Common Core connections.

For Madlenka, a trip around her city block is like a trip around the world.

For Madlenka, who has just discovered that she has a loose tooth, the block is a world unto itself, a familiar, self-contained place and also a realm of infinite newness and variety, always reassuringly the same and yet constantly changing its shape, color and texture. Her adventure is perfectly ordinary and completely magical, like the wonderful, scary experience of losing a tooth. . . . The book's design is ingenious, a kind of two-dimensional hypertext of maps and windows that allows you to flip from the cartography of real places to a geography of pure imagination. . . . A book to be read slowly and repeatedly. The New York Times Book Review

As he did withTibet Through the Red Box, S?s takes readers to exotic lands, yet continues to bring them back to the comfort of what they know. . . . When Madlenka returns home and tells her parents that she went all around the world,' readers will feel that they, too, have been armchair travelers, delivered safely homel3ï