Chico | Sandra Day O'Connor | Chico made me wish I had grown up on a ranch

Chico | Sandra Day O'Connor | Generates curiosity in a child!

books:

Chico

	Chico Sandra Day O'Connor Dutton Juvenile, 2005 - 32 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Sandra loves ranch life. Most of all, she loves riding her pony, Chico. But a ride to visit a new calf ends in a terrifying encounter with a rattlesnake. Sandra learns an important lesson about taking care of herself and her horse?and about overcoming her fears.

In this story, based on a true-life incident, young Sandra demonstrates the forthright spirit that gave her the courage and confidence to become the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court. Her adventure with Chico in the desert landscape is breathtakingly rendered by celebrated painter Dan Andreasen.

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Chico made me wish I had grown up on a ranch

Chico is a quiet story about the relationship between a girl and her horse. The first woman Supreme Court justice has written an engaging story about her childhood and growing up on an Arizona ranch. The illustrations by Dan Andreasen are exceptional. I've probably read the story to my granddaughters a dozen times, but when I pick it up for myself, I look at the illustrations.

If your daughter likes animals or dreams about becoming a cowgirl, you can't go wrong with Chico.
The Shut Mouth Society
The Shopkeeper

Generates curiosity in a child!

The illsutrations are delightful. I read this book with my niece and nephew, both New York City kids. They were enchanted by the birth of the calf, the rattlesnake, the antelope and the beautiful Chico. At the end of the reading, they said, "We want to go see where Sandra lives and look for the rainbow."

When a story generates curiosity in a child, I consider the author's mission accomplished!

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Loved it

As a school librarian, I found this an excellent book to add to our collection. It is just the right length to read to a class when they visit the library. Most of the students were amazed to find out this is based on a true story. The illustrations by Dan Andreasen are absolutley beautiful and accompany every page of text.

great book for grandchild

this proved to be a wonderful book for my 11 yr. old granddaughter who is in love with horses. she read it immediately and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Fear the egg-laying kittens!

Sandra Day O'Connor, Chico (Dutton, 2005)

The front cover of Chico proclaims "a true story from the childhood of the first woman Supreme Court Justice." Putting aside the slightly questionable grammar of that subtitle, the question it has to raise in your mind is: is the story contained in the book less important then the fact that it was written by the first woman etc.?". Unfortunately, the answer is yes; this is likely not a story that would have made it into a kids' book had it been submitted by you, me, or Joe Blow.

As one would expect from a woman who spent the better part of her career writing Supreme Court opinions, the actual mechanics of the story are solid; the spelling, grammar (with the exception of one painful slip near the beginning that still has me amused days later), etc. are all excellent. The illustrations are quite nice, though having a ten-year-old daughter (and a ten-year-old sister-in-law), I'd have to say the child in those illustrations looks considerably older than six. (Say, ten.) But that's a minor point.

What's really missing here is a sense of pace, or more specifically a sense of the structure that one would normally expect pace to take. In everything from Shakespeare to the latest Dan Brown potboiler, there's a conventional way to structure one's pace: there's the buildup, there's the climax, and there's the resolution/denouement (depending on the tone of your book). Well, that's quite an oversimplification, but you get the idea. O'Connor gives us a decent setup, then we wait for the climax. And wait. And keep waiting. Upon reflection, this is actually really impressive in a thirty-two page book; one usually doesn't get this much waiting without reading Ha Jin. There are a few places that seem as if they're going to be climaxes, but no such luck. Without a climax, the resolution feels oddly (wait for it...) anticlimactic. I'm wondering if kids will notice this as much as adults will; I'm thinking about having my wife (who's a day care teacher) test-drive it on her class.

Seems more an artifact for O'Connor fans than an actual kids' book. Not that there's anything wrong with that. ** ½

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reviews: page 1, 2

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