Module 3 : Ox Cart Man

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SUMMARY
Ox Cart Man is a poetic storybook about early America written by Donald Hall and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. The pictures are very golden with thin outlines. The story takes the reader on a year long journey in New England through the seasons.

APA REFERENCE
Hall, D., Cooney, B., & Viking Press. (1979). Ox-cart man. New York: Viking Press.

IMPRESSIONS
The pictures are almost like a painted collage, and that makes this particular style of illustrations work with the setting being in New England. The reader is really taken on a journey, and is able to travel with the characters in the book.


PROFESSIONAL REVIEW

[Review of Ox Cart Man, by Donald Hall]. Horn Book. Retrieved 10/15/14 from     http://www.hbook.com/2013/10/news/awards/horn-book-reviews-caldecott-medal-winners-1980-1989/#.

Like a pastoral symphony translated into picture book format, the stunning combination of text and illustrations re-creates the mood of nineteenth-century rural New England. Economical and straightforward, the narrative achieves a poetic tone through the use of alliteration and  repetition, as in the description of the ox-cart man’s preparations for his journey to Portsmouth. “He packed a bag of wool / he sheared from the sheep in April. / He packed a shawl his wife wove on a loom/ from yarn spun at the spinning wheel / from sheep sheared in April.” As an appropriate contrast, the full-color illustrations, suggesting early American paintings on wood, depict the countryside through which he travels, the jostle of the marketplace, and the homely warmth of family life. The various phenomena of the New England landscape —  the vibrant foliage of autumn, the lurid sunsets of winter, the delicate abundance of an orchard in spring — evoke the pattern of a lifestyle geared to the rhythm of the seasonal cycle. Quiet but not static, the book celebrates the peacefulness of a time now past but one which is still, nevertheless, an irrefutable part of the American consciousness.

reviewed in the February 1980 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1981

LIBRARY USES

This would be a great story to read aloud, and have an open discussion to talk about all the different jobs that each family member had. A discussion can also be about how families work together to make things happen for the better. This story shows how a family working together is a lot like teamwork. Another discussion could be how we do things differently in modern times versus how they were done in the story.