When Lightning Comes in a Jar
Illustrator-author Patricia Polacco returns to Norman Rockwell-era  Michigan for another autobiographical meditation, this time on the importance of  passing "the lightning of our stories and our heritage into the jars of our  children's minds."A fondly remembered family reunion provides the sweeter-than-sweet backdrop for  this picture book, as Polacco recalls how she and her cousins eagerly  anticipated her Gramma helping them "catch lightning in a jar." The "lightning,"  of course, eventually comes thanks to some incarcerated insects, but is warmly  preceded by all sorts of metaphorical strikes and flashes: Auntie Bertha's  trademark meatloaf cooked with a hard-boiled egg in the middle ("like a giant  eye"), watermelon-seed-spitting and croquet games (interrupted by "friendly  quarrels about bent hoops, crooked wickets and wanting to take reshots"), and,  most importantly, oh-so-many stories about an umbrella-loving rattlesnake, a  seven-mile walk to a one-room schoolhouse, and a grandfather who "saved souls as  a circuit preacher when he wasn't farming."Polacco's nostalgic pencil and watercolor illustrations chronicle the day's  frolics, all the way up to its buggy climax. She then leaves the Greatest  Generation behind for an instructive final act, about a new reunion and "a new  crop of children": "I'll send them home with full bellies, tired bones and  flickering jars in their laps. Their hearts will be overflowing. Full of  lightning, put there by folks who loved them even before they were born." (Ages  4 to 8)--Paul Hughes--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.