Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair - Required Reading

I enjoyed Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair, by Patricia Polacco, but not as much as I enjoyed her other books. This book was about a town who watched TV all the time. They didn't read books. In fact, books were used to fix potholes, leaky roofs, and, most importantly, the Triple Creek Dam. Eli's Aunt Chip stays in bed all the time and doesn't even own a television set. One day, she starts to teach Eli how to read. He hadn't even known that books were for reading! When he knows how to read, all the other kids want to know how. One day, he reaches to grab Moby Dick out of a wall of books and realizes that he just took a chunk out of the dam! All of the books fly everywhere and it is a mess! Everyone's televisions stop working and they are mad. Eventually, all the kids say they will teach their parents and grandparents to read. The town rebuilds the library and Aunt Chip is the librarian!

As I said, I did not enjoy this as much as I enjoyed Patricia Polacco's other books. I found it interesting, though, that the pictures of many of the children were the same as the children in her other books. When I read her other book, I felt as though I was really part of the story. I felt as if I were in a real story that could actually have happened. Though this book made a good point about the importance of reading, I did not feel nearly as connected to the story as I did in The Butterfly or Pink and Say or even Chicken Sunday. Of the four books by this author, this is the one I would be least likely to have in my classroom. I feel that there are other books that better get across the message of the importance of reading.