A Visit to Oma

From School Library Journal Grade 1-3-- Every Sunday Celeste visits her great-grandmother Oma, who lives with the girl's aunt and uncle. Oma is a tiny, white-haired woman in a black dress and pearls who speaks only one word of English, "Come!" Then she regales her great-granddaughter with lively, albeit incomprehensible, tales to which Celeste makes up her own scenarios. On this particular day, Celeste concocts an elaborate story of an unhappy marriage in which Oma disgraces herself by escaping from her oafish husband on their wedding night. After the divorce, a poor but personable traveling salesman falls in love with her and becomes Celeste's great-grandfather. A winning idea and certainly typical of a girl's fertile, romantic imagination, the premise seems a little beyond the experience of the likely audience for this book. But the loving closeness between old and young family members will be warmly satisfying to all age levels. Full-page illustrations face elegantly framed, small blocks of short sentences in large, clear print, and have a decorative, charm reminiscent of Vera Williams's paintings; pure colors and intricate patterns lend excitement and variety. Celeste's imagined tale, in which Oma is a slender, brown-haired beauty, is given a European setting, while the current happenings take place in a comfortable city apartment. --Patricia Pearl, formerly at First Presbyterian School, Martinsville, VACopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Kirkus Reviews Every week, Celeste calls on Oma, her great-grandmother, receiving a warm welcome and listening patiently to Oma's long stories--which Celeste can't understand: Oma doesn't speak English. But Celeste can fashion her own story; perhaps Oma is describing a long-ago arranged marriage to a man so distasteful that she fled just before she would have changed into her nightgown, causing a scandal but surviving it to make a happy marriage later. Celeste's tale of what might have been is both the kind of history that lurks in any family's past and evidence that, ancient as Oma is, Celeste believes in the reality of her youth. Using bold areas of solid color in dynamic compositions enriched with borders and decorative patterns, Russo evokes Oma's cozy room and subtly suggests Celeste's mixed feelings. A perceptive glimpse of a child's imaginative concept of her elder's past. (Picture book. 5-9) --