Saturdays and Teacakes Book

Every Saturday a young boy rides his bicycle up and down country roads past farms, a graveyard, and a filling station, until he reaches his beloved Mammaw's house. She is waiting for him. While she picks tomatoes, he pushes the lawnmower through the dew-wet grass. Afterwards, he always helps her make teacakes from scratch, breaking the eggs and stirring the batter. But the best part, he remembers, is eating the hot, sweet cakes fresh from the oven. Set in a small town in the Leave It to Beaverdays of the mid-sixties, the story evokes a gentler and more innocent time and place. Young readers will almost hear the sounds of bicycle wheels on gravel and the criiick-craaack-criiick of a metal glider in Laminack's richly detailed prose. Award-winning illustrator Chris Soentpiet's images beautifully capture the relationship and the place, perfectly depicting the simplicity of an earlier time.

Publishers Weekly

Laminack (The Sunsets of Miss Olivia Wiggins) takes a sweet trip down memory lane in this ode to his grandmother, but forgets that his passengers need more than nostalgia to make the journey worthwhile. "When I was nine or ten years old I couldn't wait for Saturdays," the narrator begins. Set in Alabama in 1964, the slice-of-life story reveals the emotional connections forged by a boy's weekly bike trips to visit his grandmother "Mammaw." They share meals, time on the porch swing, yard work and making teacakes (the recipe for which is on the publisher's Web site). Tactile descriptions help engage readers ("[The dough] was smooth and pale yellow and smelled like fresh cotton candy at the county fair") but the slow-paced, minimal action may lose them. For example, a moment-by-moment itinerary of the boy's bike trip seems extraneous. Soentpiet (My Brother Martin) creates an appealingly wholesome, Mayberry-esque vision of the town, with flower-filled yards, smiling gas station attendants and Mammaw's gleaming red and white kitchen. A high-intensity light seems to shine on his wide-ranging palette of watercolors, giving a souped-up, faintly surreal glow to these scenes of loving intergenerational ties. Ages 4-8. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.