Bag in the Wind
Grade 4–6—In his first children's book, the former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner tells an environmental story about a plastic grocery bag as it is blown out of a landfill, over a considerable distance, and eventually into the hands of some people who reuse it. Young Margaret picks it up to carry discarded cans she sells for scrap metal. A woman uses it to block a draft under her door. Two street people pick it up but eventually drop it. A man bundles it with other bags and sells them to a woman who runs a secondhand store. The story comes full circle when Margaret buys a baseball glove and ball there and carries her purchases home in the very bag she had initially found. Root's watercolor and gouache paintings, often golden-hued landscape spreads, follow the bag from its bright early-morning wanderings, through the day and shadowy night, and into the daylight once again. Long, compound sentences flow smoothly as they describe the bag's protracted journey, offering poetic images such as "clouds like enormous black leaf bags" that race across the moon. Older children who can listen to the lengthy text will benefit from hearing the beauty of the language and, in addition, will learn about recycling plastic bags from the informative author's note.—Marianne Saccardi, formerly at Norwalk Community College, CTCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.