Judith St. George
Philomel (2008)
ISBN 9780399241741
Reviewed by Simon Smith (age 9) for Reader Views (5/08)
“Stand Tall, Abe Lincoln,” by Judith St. George, is about Abe Lincoln’s life from when he was born to when he was about fifteen. This book is a good mix of a detailed picture book and a short chapter book. I learned from reading this book that there really are schools called “blab schools” and that Abraham Lincoln really hated slavery or cruelty to anything in any kind of way. Abraham grew up as a perfectly healthy boy and from the start seemed to have a love of animals.
Unfortunately for Abe, though, his mother Nancy died because of milk sickness, which is when a cow eats a certain type of weed and the milk is poisonous. Later, Abe’s father decided to find a new wife so he left the three kids alone in the house, which is something no parent would ever dare to do these days. Abraham Lincoln loved to read and when his father found a new wife, and she moved in, Abraham found that she owned many books and that he was welcome to read them. For about four years of his life, when they once moved, Abraham Lincoln did not have to go to school because there was no school, unlike the schools today that keep on coming up like bugs.
There were two things that I did not like about this book. One was that there was one sentence that said that killing a pig was as cruel as slavery, even if they needed to kill the pig for good reasons. The other was that one of the pictures of Abraham Lincoln reading on a horse while it was resting seemed to be in the wrong place since the writing about it was on another page. On every page, there is a large illustration. I think that the illustrations in “Stand Tall, Abe Lincoln” do add to the story a lot and help you think about what it would have been like to have lived Abraham Lincoln’s life. I think this was a pretty good book for those two things I mentioned and it is good for kids aged five and up.
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