The Lonely Phonebooth
Gr 3-5–On the corner of West End Avenue and 100th Street in Manhattan there stands an old-fashioned phone booth, a  superfluous fixture in our cell-phone world. This lonely phone booth, however, enjoys a happy ending after an electric storm shuts down the city. Finding their cell phones dead but the landlines in working order, a grateful neighborhood rallies to save the booth after a city crew threatens to haul it to the dump. Ackerman injects humor into the tale through a bevy of characters from everyday passersby (a construction foreman needing more cement and a Girl Scout calling for cookies) to the eccentric (a zookeeper looking for a lost elephant and a secret agent needing to change his disguise). Dalton adds wit and color with illustrations that are a combination of individual vignettes and full-page images. A well-paced story but probably most appealing to adults predisposed to preservation projects.Barbara Elleman, Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA© Copyright 2010.  Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc.  No redistribution permitted.