The Girl of the Wish Garden - A Thumbelina Story

Book: The Girl of the Wish Garden - A Thumbelina Story
Author: Uma Krishnaswami

Illustrator: Nasrin Khosravi
Genre: Fantasy
Major Awards: N/A
Age Group: Kindergarten - 3rd

Summary: Lina is a child that was found by her mother in a silken flowers where birds sang and trees blew in the wind. Her mother was quite worried about her because she was so small and wouldn't grow. She would almost get eaten by frogs, even when she tried to yell for help with her tiny voice. She, suddenly, had a song that came to mind and decided to sing that to the fish so that they could help her create a raft from the leaf she was floating on. Later, she gets encountered by crazybugs, ghost creatures, all trying to keep her up at night. She managed to escape with the help of a nice mouse and it led her to a swallow through a tiny door. Songs benefit anything that surround Lina, so she tried singing to make the swallow heal. When the swallow woke up, it said that it had been waiting for her and she rode away on the back of the swallow with an accompanying horse. They flew away into a world that was far from the world, leaving only a breath of fresh air behind as a memory.

Evaluation & Comments: I would not use this book for a lesson in my classroom. At first glance, I thought that this would be a good book to use because of the pretty illustrations and the words looked easy to read. However, after reading it through, I found that there were some words scattered throughout that would probably not be suitable for little kids to understand. Of course, I would teach them the words I think they need to know beforehand, but it wouldn't be used for a whole lesson. I would probably just leave it in my classroom library and if my students liked it during out end of class read aloud, then they can pick it up during their free time and read it if they would like. For an activity as a whole class, I would have them draw something, anything they wanted, on a piece of copy paper. I would glue them all together into kind of like a mosaic and create some type of cool artwork like shown in the book.