A Desert Scrapbook

Children's Literature - Beverly Kobrin

Virginia Wright-Frierson's Desert Scrapbook, is a vibrant "recording" of the Sonoran Desert, its flora and fauna -from dawn's clear-blue cool to sun-set's vibrant orange-purple glow. Suggest students turn to the author/artist's watercolor sketches, annotations, and connecting narrative for a good read, reference, or inspiration to stop, look, listen, and sketch details about a nearby habitat in similar "scrapbook" fashion.

Children's Literature - Marilyn Courtot

If you can't personally visit the Sonoran Desert, Wright-Frierson's watercolor sketches provide the next best thing in her scenes of this vast and unique environment. Peopled with unusual desert creatures and vegetation that has adapted to the harsh environment, readers will enjoy the conversational style and close personal observations of the author/artist.

School Library Journal

Gr 3-6An artist's readable narrative accompanies her accomplished drawings in this slim, colorful volume. Wright-Frierson invites readers to spend a day in her company, savoring the Sonoran Desert of the American Southwest. She presents a dawn to dusk panorama in a profusion of watercolor sketches and a brief, conversational text. While calling to mind Jennifer Dewey's Night and Day in the Desert (Little, 1991) or Joyce Powzyk's Wallaby Creek (Lothrop, 1985), this artist's sketchbook is intensely personal. Her goal is not scientific depth, though the snippets of information may well entice the intellectually curious to conduct further investigations. Rather, her "scrapbook" serves to give a rich impression of a unique ecological environment: a feel for a landscape of compelling extremes and the creatures who have adapted to meet its unforgiving demands. Admirably done.Patricia Manning, Eastchester Public Library, NY

Ilene Cooper

nger for reading aloud. This is a lovely tribute to the Sonoran Desert by an author-illustrator who has spent many hours observing and sketching there. Writing in the first person, Wright-Frierson describes the many sights she has seen on her rambles and includes handsome watercolors of animals, insects, and plants, as well as tinier pieces of the desert's landscape, such as quail eggs, butterfly wings, a prickly pear pad, and even cottontail droppings. The picture-book format makes this accessible to younger children as well as middle-graders who might use it for school reports. Highly evocative and quite beautiful, this will give readers a real sense of the desert and what is hidden just below its expansive surface.

Kirkus Reviews

Subtitled "Dawn to Dusk in the Sonoran Desert," this is a fascinating personal introduction to the ecology of a desert. In her first solo effort, Wright-Frierson (illustrator of Sheila Cole's When the Tide Is Low, 1985, among others) organizes her book as a series of dawn-to-dusk, sketchbook impressions made during many trips to the desert for observation and watercolor painting. The vivid text takes the form of involving first-person journal entries that accompany accurate, beautiful watercolors of the desert (in one, she includes her own hands sketching in a notebook as part of the illustration). Roadrunners, tortoises, jackrabbits, snakes, elf owls, and woodpeckers are just a few of the animals observed and documented in their habitat, while Saguaro cactus, creosote, acacia, prickly pear, and mesquite fill each page. There is much to enjoy, but the first lessons to absorb are on becoming careful, consistent investigators of nature. Exemplary science writing.