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Narrated by Susan Ericksen
Gary PaulsenUnabridged — 1 hours, 44 minutes
Narrated by Susan Ericksen
Gary PaulsenUnabridged — 1 hours, 44 minutes
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A six-year-old boy goes to spend the summer with his grandmother Alida in a small Minnesota town. With the men all gone off to fight, the women are left to run the farms. There's plenty for the boy to do - trying to help with the chores; getting to know the dog and the horses, cows, pigs, and chickens.
But when his cousin Kristina goes into labor, he can't do a thing. Instead, the house fills with women come to help and to wait, and to work on the quilt together. This is no common, everyday quilt, but one that contains all the stories of the boy's family. And as they wait, and work, the women share these stories with the boy.
In this spare, affecting novel, ordinary life and ordinary things take on a new meaning, and the bond between a boy and his grandmother shines through.
A follow-up to Alida's Song, The Quilt by Gary Paulsen relates the boy's experiences at age six, spending time at his grandmother's Minnesota farm in the summer of 1944. Here, they, along with the other women whose husbands are off fighting, help a neighbor who is ready to give birth. In this moving sequel, the boy learns about life, death and the quilt that is a pictorial record of his familial ancestry. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Gr 6 Up-In this semi-autobiographical novella, Paulsen again writes lovingly about the grandmother who provided such warmth and comfort in his difficult young life during and after World War II. The protagonist, first met in The Cookcamp (Orchard, 1991) and later in Alida's Song (Delacorte, 1999) is still "the boy," an impersonal term that keeps readers at a distance. It is hard to feel empathy with an anonymous child who is described with adult sensibilities, even though some of the scenes are powerfully written. Especially evocative is the description of the boy and his grandmother's stay with a pregnant cousin who delivers a son and then learns that her husband has been killed in action. However, when the six-year-old questions his grandmother about the men his mother brings back to their apartment and whether they have anything to do with the war, the observation seems forced. Also, the pacing is slow and deliberate. The quilt of the title is how he learns about his heritage and his extended family. However, it is mentioned at the end of the first chapter and not addressed again until nearly 50 pages later. This story works best as an adult reflection and does not have much appeal or relevancy to younger readers.-Edith Ching, St. Albans School, Mt. St. Alban, Washington, DC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
In 1944, with his father at war and his mother working the night shift at the munitions factory, the narrator-"the boy"-goes to live with his grandmother Alida in northern Minnesota. At a neighboring farm, seven miles and seven hours away, Alida and several local women have gathered for the birth of Kristina's baby. They share a ritual of holding a quilt and telling "quilt stories" about their lives and those who have passed. It's a quiet, beautiful tale of magic in the faces and hands of the women holding the cloth. So much of life, death, and the strength of women is told in evocative prose rich in vivid details. Begun in The Cookcamp (1991) and continued in Alida's Song (1999), this is Paulsen's ode to his grandmother and what women "had to do to keep life, and families, together during the war." A story to savor and share and Paulsen at his best. (Fiction. 8-12)
Paulsen’s third and final autobiographical novel honoring the grandmother who played such an important role in his childhood was originally published in 2005. The author himself introduces this new audio edition, setting the stage for the story of an event that happened when he was 6 years old. Susan Ericksen brings “the boy” and his grandmother to life. She does an especially noteworthy job with the dialogue, giving the grandmother an accent that fits a Norwegian grandmother with a heart of gold. Her pacing and tone suggest that she’s sharing the story with a young child as she paints a lovely picture of the special relationship between the boy and the grandmother who loves him. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940169554502 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Brilliance Audio |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2013 |
| Series: | Alida Series |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Age Range: | 8 - 11 Years |
For America, World War II lasted for nearly five years. During those years there was a time when the boy could not live with his mother.
His father had gone off to fight one week after the boy was born and his motherwent to work in a munitions factory in Chicago. At first the boy lived with her in the tiny apartment by the elevated railway. Soon, though, other people—men—came to visit her and she started to do very grown-up things. He did not fit in, and when life with his mother became too difficult, he went to live with his grandmother.
The first time this happened his grandmother was working as a cook for a group of men building a war road from northern Minnesota up into Canada. They spent a wonderful summer together; later he would remember only good things about those months and indeed all the times he was with his grandmother.
He called her Grandma. Her name was Alida but he called her Grandma and he loved her very much, as he would love her the rest of her life and his life, and she adored him as well and cooked him apple pies and knitted stockings and mittens for him even though it was summer and read him letters from his mother, which made him love his mother, even though sometimes he would look at the paper his grandmother held and see that there was no writing on it. And she spoke to him in Norwegian as if he were a little man and not a boy.
The second time he went to live with his grandmother he was just six and he stayed with her at first in her small house in a little town near the Canadian border, in Minnesota.
There were only a hundred and forty people living in this town and he lived with her in a two-room house that was set on the outskirts of the village near a small stream. The water made a wonderful burbling noise that helped him sleep when he thought of his mother in Chicago and missed her.
Once, while his grandmother was sitting at the small table in the one room that served as parlor, living room and kitchen, he asked her, "If I miss Mother so much"—and he called her Mother then, although when he spoke to his mother he always called her Mom—"why is it that I can't be with her?"
And his grandmother, who was crocheting what would become a bedspread, put her crocheting down on her lap. She took him in her arms, which he always liked but did not see a reason for now, and said, "She is living in a very fast time, your mother, and working very hard, and she would not have time to spend with you and that would make her sad. It's bad to be sad."
"Sometimes in the night when I think of her and miss her I'm sad."
"I know, I know. And that is why you're with me. That's just the way things are now."
"Is it because of the war?"
"Yes. It's the war."
"I thought it was because of the men who came home with her from the plant where they make bullets for the soldiers."
"No. Those men are nothing and you mustn't think about them."
"Do they come home with her because of the war?"
"Yes. They are nothing to think about." And she went back to her crochetingexcept that he could see that her fingers went very fast and hard with the crochet hook, and she missed a stitch and had to go back. He could tell that she was upset but could not understand why and thought it was something he'd said, and hugged her and stood next to her that way for several moments. Then he said, because he thought it would help, "I don't miss my father at all."
Her fingers stopped for a moment, then continued, more slowly, and she sighed. "You never saw him. He was in the deserts in California training in tanks when you were born and they sent him right overseas."
"But I will see him someday."
"Yes."
"After the war."
"Yes, after the war."
He thought for another moment. "When will the war be over?"
Her fingers stopped again and her voice grew tight and with the clipped sound of her Norwegian accent had almost knife edges. "When men are sick and tired of being men . . ." She trailed off. "Never mind. The war will be over when it's over. Go play outside."
It was summer and he played on the edge of the water and in the stream, which was only ankle-deep, making boats with leaves and sticks and lying down on his side to make them look bigger so they were like ships as they bounced and careened down the rapids. Enemy ships, which he had seen in newsreels on the rare occasions when his mother had taken him to Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies in Chicago, which he liked very much—the movies—even though he did not know exactly what an enemy was except that one was German and one was Japaneseand he did not know exactly what they were except that they were bad and soldiers were fighting them.
