The Pilgrims

School Library Journal

Gr 4-6-The writing in these overviews is straightforward and a bit dry, although the layout is attractive, with a good balance of color illustration to text. Pilgrims asserts that "King Henry VIII ruled England in the 1600s." He died in 1547. While this is the only outright factual error, the treatment of the Pilgrims' relations with Native Americans is portrayed as mutually sympathetic and understanding from the get-go. The text presents the Euro-American view only, with no clear articulation beyond assertions of the Indians' great friendship for the settlers. The almost exclusive use of romanticized illustrations adds to the unwarrantedly rosy view of life in the New World. This is a pity as a reasonable amount of solid information is packed into four chapters. Still, with books like Marcia Sewall's The Pilgrims of Plimoth (Atheneum, 1986) and Kate Waters's Sarah Morton's Day (Scholastic, 1989), this title can be bypassed. Some of the same general quibbles apply to Castle. The lot of the serfs is only briefly addressed with a passing mention that their lives were brutish and short. The bulk of the four chapters focuses on the life of the nobility, presented in a pleasantly sanitized form-it all seems like life now, just with no flush toilets or cars. The illustrations do enhance the text, but cannot bring it up to the level of Christopher Maynard's Days of the Knights (1998) or Christopher Gravett's Castle (2000, both DK).-Ann Welton, Grant Elementary School, Tacoma, WA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.