Synopsis
A powerfully moving, authentic portrait of the Statue of Liberty, told through the eyes of those who created her and illustrated in glorious detail.
"Soon America will be one hundred years old. I share my dream of a birthday gift."
It begins in 1865 as a romantic idea, but ten years later Édouard Laboulaye’s dream catches fire and takes shape. Sculptor Auguste Bartholdi gives the dream the form of a lady, holding a torch to "enlighten the world." Engineers, plasterers, carpenters, coppersmiths — many of them immigrants — work together to turn the lady into a monument over 100 feet tall. Joseph Pulitzer calls on readers to help fund a pedestal, and hundreds send in nickels, dimes, and even roosters for the cause. Doreen Rappaport’s historically accurate, poetic vignettes and Matt Tavares’s magnificent images remind us of the true origins of a national symbol — and show that it took a lot of people to make the Lady.
The New York Times - James McMullan
Rappaport uses a literary device that gives the writing a satisfying emotional immediacy: after an introduction about her immigrant grandfather, she tells the story of the statue's conception and construction entirely through the imagined voices of the principal actors…It is historical teaching in a smoothly disguised form that should appeal to the curious 7- or 8-year-old, who would be the ideal reader for this book…In Matt Tavares, Rappaport has been matched with a wonderfully sympathetic illustrator. Where she gives the reader a first-person description of Lady Liberty's making, Tavares creates images with a pageantlike grandeur. He achieves this by arranging the figures in classically simple compositions and through his use of light.