Anne Isaacs (1) (1949–)

A tall tale full of fun exaggeration treated as true, from the fiery trails that speedy Estella leaves in her wake when she runs, to the fantastical animals that come to her for care, to the (so creatively!) frozen town of Luckless Gulch. When Estella's rock-breaking and -eating pets are stolen, she races all over pancake-flat California asking Gold Rush hopefuls for news. She hears of a mysterious frozen town greedy dead prospectors have frozen the land so they can dig in the dark they prefer...and what does an incorporeal ghost miner need but some rock-breaking animals to help? Good thing they don't call her Estella corriente, the running star, for nothing! Still, the angry ghosts creat enough of a ruckus to throw up quite a few hills and shake the ground from time to time.

Lots of fun, but picture book for an older audience--there's quite a bit of text on each page and the parts where Estella meets her three pets and where a miner tells her the stories of three starving prospectors slow down the pace a bit.

I also loved the whitewood-to-redwood detail (the white trees got sunburned when the hills put them too close to the sun), but couldn't fit it in here since it was kind of just a side note in the story.… (més)

In the same vein as other American folklore featuring larger-than-life characters such as Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, Swamp Angel is the story of Angelica Longrider, the greatest Tennessee woodswoman who ever lived. She is unbelievably huge, strong, and tough, and performs all manner of impossible feats such as rescuing an entire wagon train that was mired in a swamp. In this story, the people of Tennessee are being tormented by a giant bear that no one can seem to kill, named Thundering Tarnation. Angelica fights with the enormous bear with so much gusto that the dust they raised renamed the mountain range the Great Smoky Mountains. Eventually, Angelica triumphs, and everyone in Tennessee shares in eating the bear, the pelt of which Angelica takes to Montana and turns into the Shortgrass Prairie. Kids should be delighted with this extremely over-the-top take on American frontier life, the illustrations capture the humor in the story very well.… (més)

Title: Swamp Angel
- Author: Anne Isaacs
- Illustrator: Paul O. Zelinsky
- Publisher: Dutton Childrens Books
- Date: September 1, 1994 (date published)
- Pages: 40
- Type of Book/Genre: Picture book, Fairytale
- Short Summary of the Plot: The story begins on August 1, 1815, in Tennessee when Angelic Longrider was born. She was a big baby, bigger than her mother, and when she grew older, she was practically a giant. She did incredible things like rescuing people, building a log cabin, and performed wonders. She became known as the Swamp Angel. There was a bear, the Thundering Tarnation, that was eating all the settlers food, so they put up a hunt with signs up to get it. The Swamp Angel signed up with all the men. All the men failed, but Swamp Angel had yet to meet the bear, when she did find him they got into a fight and she threw him into the heavens, and brought him back down with the help from a tornado. They fought for days, and Tarnation eventually pinned swamp angel to the bottom of a lake. She drank the whole lake to get some air, but even after that the bear would not let her go, so she got him to sneeze and she was released. They started to fight again, and fell asleep because they got tired. While they slept their snoring knocked down the whole forest. A tree ended up falling down on the bear and killed him, the whole town celebrated and had all kinds of bear food from him. Swamp angel kept his pelt and brought it with her to Montana, and the pelt is known as Shortgrass Prairie because of it. You can still see Thundering Tarnation in the stars on a clear night.
- Tags/Subject Heading that describes the Content: Giants, settlers, fighting, food.
- My response: I did not know what to expect when beginning this book, and I was pleasantly surprised.… (més)