Let's Celebrate Thanksgiving Day

by Barbara deRubertis, Thomas Sperling (Illustrator)

The passing seasons are used as a vehicle to tell the parallel stories of the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims, from the European settlers' landing in 1620 through the first Thanksgiving feast in November of 1621.

32 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Nora]

currently in bed with a headache, but i wanted a quick read and this certainly was that. i don't know what i expected, but i did have a little hope after the book(let) opened with a pronounciation guide - albeit probably a very anglicised one. illustration wise, this is nothing special, some historical sources mingled with generic illustrations and google stock photographs of random items. story wise, this of course perpetuates a fairly harmless series of interactions between settlers / colonists and natives, ending on the argument that at their core, both groups were just the same! i don't think i actually know enough about thanksgiving as such to intellectually truly challenge this (not my time period), but this does not give me the impression that it is an accurate portrayal of first interactions between colonizers and natives. expected nothing, and got nothing!

[Paula]

This title is one of the “Holidays & Heroes” series and is a re-issue of the 1992 book that introduced intermediate readers to the Thanksgiving holiday. The basic story of the first Thanksgiving is told in straightforward language with suitable illustrations, engravings and maps to aid readers’ understanding. It begins in November, 1620, with the arrival of the Mayflower. The author incorporates four poems about the seasons into the story as it tells about the seasonal activities of the Indians and Pilgrims during that first year, culminating with an autumn stanza that coincides with the first Thanksgiving. All in all it’s an okay book about the first Thanksgiving, but the interspersed poems are distracting at the least and may be confusing for younger readers. Order if needed.

[Paula]

Originally published in 1992, this entry in the reissued Holidays & Heroes series uses the passing seasons as a vehicle to tell the parallel stories of the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims, from the European settlers' landing in 1620 through the first Thanksgiving feast in November of 1621. It is a fairly straight-forward, reader-friendly account of the first Thanksgiving - though there is a random poem that is used to delineate the seasons, which appears in italics (theoretically to set it apart from the main text) and detracts from the flow of the text. This is an adequate addition to the holiday shelves and does a decent job of showing what the first Thanksgiving looked like. Optional.