A little boy named Harry sits on a porch with his friend, Mr. George Baker, who “is a hundred years old, no kidding….all snappy and happy in the morning.” Almost every day they meet– sitting, waiting, sharing chocolate candies the way that true friends do.

Each of them has a red book bag with a book inside, a book that neither of them has yet learned how to read. “That must be corrected,” says Mr. George Baker.

As they wait, Mr. George Baker taps out rhythms with “his crookedy fingers.” “He’s a drummer man,” Harry explains, “Some people say he’s famous.”

The school bus pulls up, George and Harry get on board and go off to school, where they sit in separate rooms, learning how to sound out letters in their green books.

“It’s hard,” complains Harry.

“We can do it,” says Mr. George Baker.

This picture book is a tribute to literacy that soars and sings. Every word is economical, precise, and forms the kind of images that we look for in poetry. Mr. George Baker, with his “crumpled hat and his long stretchy legs,” a Dixieland drummer who still dances with his ninety-year-old wife, is revealed by Amy Hest‘s lyrical text as much as he is by Jon J Muth‘s pale and misty illustrations. He and Harry, united in friendship and their quest for literacy, become permanent residents in the imaginations of all who encounter them in the pages of this lovely, magical story.

This Reading Rainbow selection is a book that demands to be read aloud to anyone and everyone within earshot.

I’d never before read anything by Nancy Farmer (although as a former children’s bookseller, of course I knew about her) until I picked up A Girl Named Disaster to read as the first Tiger’s Choice. I was lucky to have found it–this book is an outstanding piece of fiction that can be read and enjoyed by a doddering fifty-nine-year-old like me or by people who are substantially younger.

In an earlier posting by Corinne on PaperTigers, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in the Philippines pointed out that children’s literature from different cultures is shaped by differing values. This is made intriguingly clear by the story of Nhamo, the girl who leaves her tribe in search of her one living parent and a family that will be truly hers. Her quest is an adventure, and a solitary one, that takes her into a world populated only by animals. Unlike similar stories written with a differing cultural perspective (Julie of the Wolves, My Side of the Mountain, Island of the Blue Dolphins), this book does not show an anthropomorphic relationship between Nhamo and the baboons who are her neighbors. A lonely and frightened child, Nhamo forges a relationship with a world of the spirits rather than with the animal kingdom. She sustains herself through stories that she knows and loves about beings of an unseen realm, and in her dreams and in her waking imagination, these are the figures that guide her, and who allow her to bring out menacing, and hitherto unexplored, parts of herself by cloaking them under different names and the persona of spirits.

Her three-part story begins with elements of Cinderella, sweeps into a Robinson Crusoe-like world, and ends with a modern-day transformation and the fulfillment of a quest. At almost 300 pages, it is longer than many pieces of fiction for children, and it contains an impressive body of information within its compelling story. Anyone who reads it will be given a sense of place that only someone who has lived in that part of Africa could provide.

It could be a problematic choice to read aloud to a classroom of boys and girls. Although Nhamo’s adventures, and her adventuresome spirit, will appeal to both genders, the author’s frankness when writing about menstruation and other physical functions could be difficult in a mixed-gender classroom if read aloud. It is, however, a dazzling choice for a parent-child book group, or to give to a reluctant reader, or to enjoy as a solitary pleasure when in need of something absorbing and magical to read.