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Summary
Summary
To make a new city feel like home, Anna gets involved with a community garden--and cultivates new friendships as well as flowers and vegetables--in the first book in the Friendship Garden series.
It may be the orange and red season of fall, but eight-year-old Anna Fincher feels nothing but gray. She and her family have just moved to Chicago for her mom's new job. Not only does Anna miss her tiny hometown and her true-blue best friends, but she misses her garden. Over the summer she and her friends had been growing big red tomatoes, bright green beans, and pink raspberries on a small plot of land in Anna's backyard.
Now, just when it's fall harvest time back home, Anna is stuck in a boring apartment with no yard, and starting a brand-new school with kids who are anything but friendly. Until one day Anna makes an amazing discovery: a little community garden right in the middle of the city. And a small idea begins to take root in a big way.
What if a bunch of kids took over a neglected, forgotten little garden plot? Could they make anything bloom--even friendship?
Author Notes
Jenny Meyerhoff is author of the Barftastic Life of Louie Burger series, as well as the books Sami's Sleepaway Summer , Third Grade Baby , and Queen of Secrets . She is also the proud planter of her very own vegetable garden. Jenny grows string beans, broccoli, and spinach, but she has never picked a purple pepper. When she's not busy writing, she likes to hang out with her husband and three children playing Scrabble and watching movies.
Éva Chatelain has had a passion for drawing since childhood. She grew up in a small French village before moving to Paris to study illustration. Visit her online at Tohu-Bohu-etc.Blogspot.com.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Meyeroff kicks off the Friendship Garden series by introducing third-grader Anna Fincher, who gets involved with a community garden after being dismayed by the lack of greenery in her new home of Chicago. Meyerhoff puts Anna's new-kid loneliness at the center of the story, and a class assignment helps Anna make friends and share her burgeoning love of gardening. Though the story can be overly sweet, readers will finish the book understanding that, like gardens, friendships need tending to thrive. Final art not seen by PW. Simultaneously available: Pumpkin Spice. Ages 7-10. Author's agent: Jennifer Mattson, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Illustrator's agency: Bright Agency. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
A school assignment helps third grader Anna make friends at her new Chicago school. With her classmates, she starts a kids' gardening club (Green) and they work together to catch the thief who stole their biggest pumpkin (Pumpkin). Likable characters in relatable situations and soft, expressive halftone illustrations make this a welcome new chapter-book series. Story-inspired activities and recipes are appended. [Review covers these Friendship Garden titles: Green Thumbs-Up! and Pumpkin Spice.] (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Anna Fincher is a third-grader who has been transplanted from sunny Rosendale, New York, to gray Chicago after her mother accepts a new job in the city. She misses the true-blue friends she was forced to leave behind, as well as the garden she used to tend. A class assignment and a run-down urban allotment provide Anna with the opportunity to address both of these needs. This first installment in the Friendship Garden series has the right amount of middle-grade social concern, mixed with serendipitous problem solving, to provide an enjoyable reading experience. The loss of friends and how to replace them is a universal worry, and readers will empathize with Anna's plight. The grown-ups in the book are peripheral enough that Anna and her friends can make some well-meaning blunders, yet close enough to ensure that nothing goes terribly awry. The illustrations complement the text and give definition to characters, who are a bit standard at first but have plenty of room to grow.--Dean, Kara Copyright 2015 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 2-4-When Anna moves into a new town, she has a hard time making friends. When a group project for school ends up helping her hit it off with two other people, things start to look up for Anna. Together, the trio comes upon a community garden. The garden looks more like a plant junkyard. The friends get an idea to start a kids garden club, but the president of the garden says they need an adult to supervise. Can they persuade an adult to help them out? This well-written book adeptly ties the multiple, but simple subplots together. The characters are likable and fairly well developed. The author's use of clever chapter headings and descriptive words draw readers easily into Anna's world. VERDICT Similar to Megan McDonalds's "Judy Moody" series (Candlewick) and Laurie Friedman's "Mallory" books (Lerner), this book will appeal to readers who enjoy humorous realistic fiction.-Kira Moody, Whitmore Public Library, Salt Lake City, UT © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A community garden grows new friendships. Starting third grade in a new school in urban Chicago, Anna misses her old life. Outside her school window there used to be green; now her view is gray. Her mother used to make family meals with fresh vegetables from their garden; now she's cooking professionally, and it's her father who makes dinner, using canned vegetables from the store. Once part of a trio of best friends, she can't see anyone in her new class who looks welcoming. But when a school assignment matches her up with Kaya, whose abuela is an enthusiastic gardener, and Reed, who loves to dig in the dirt, they bond over the idea of forming a gardening club. Their need for an adult sponsor adds some suspense, but this hurdle is easily overcome. The appearance of garden-destroying raccoons adds humor. This comfortable school-and-friendship story is firmly set in the present day; Anna's mother joins the family via computer video chat at dinner. The 8-year-old has believable worries and appropriate hesitations as she negotiates these big changes and the beginning stages of new friendships. The finished book will include black-and-white illustrations, not seen. The Friendship Garden series will continue with a companion book, Pumpkin Spice (2015). Accessible and familiar, this series opener should appeal to relatively new readers of chapter books. (Fiction. 7-9) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Green Thumbs-Up! Excerpted from Green Thumbs-Up! by Jenny Meyerhoff All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
