Title: Grandfather’s Wrinkles
Author: Kathryn England
Publisher: Flashlight Press
Author Kathryn England presents a little girl named Lucy gently asking her bemused grandfather how and why his smiling face became wrinkled. In Richard McFarland’s exquisitely rendered outdoor scenes, Granddad explains how he happily earned each groove, crinkle and wrinkle.
They were etched into his skin the day he married Lucy’s grandmother, the day Lucy’s mother was born, on the wedding day of his precious daughter and the hour when Lucy came into his world.
Humor abounds in every word and unusually rendered vivid scenes of Grandfather’s Wrinkles. The subtleties of McFarland’s illustrations are stories in themselves, evoking the sentiment and style of a vintage 1950s wedding, the meaning of timeless love on page 29, and the rewards of lives so well-lived that the evidence lies in traces of long-ago smiles.
Those smiles are shared by every person in Lucy and Granddad’s lives. Little Lucy even starts the enduring spread of laugh and smile lines on her beloved face at story’s end.
Flashlight Press is aptly named. Children will be awake all night, reading this book under their covers with some sort of handy illumination. For children with intact families, and those without, Grandfather’s Wrinkles allows a young reader to grasp what healthy family relationships are all about.
Be sure to add this book to your local community and school libraries, as well as to personal book collections. Therapists might even appreciate its effects on clients, who will surely want to discuss the genuine emotions evoked in the book.
Yocheved Golani is the author of It’s MY Crisis! And I’ll Cry if I Need To: A Life Book that Helps You to Dry Your Tears and to Cope with a Medical Challenge.
Advertisement