Ellen Handler Spitz in The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Poetry is an inexhaustible gift for children
In her article in the Sunday Book Review titled “That Amherst Belle,” Ellen Handler Spitz reviews two new children’s books: Eileen Spinelli’s “Another Day as Emily,” illustrated by Joanne Lew-Vriethoff, and Burleigh Mutén’s “Miss Emily,” illustrated by Matt Phelan. She notes the two books “strive to create, by very different means and with different results, a sense of the poet Emily Dickinson as a person.”
Spitz writes the two books do a good job of introducing readers to Dickinson’s “eccentric persona,” but an opportunity is lost because none of Dickinson’s poems is printed in full in either book.
Ellen Handler Spitz has written frequently about children’s literature for The New Republicand is author of “Illuminating Childhood.”
Posted: May 20, 2014, 8:14 PM