This book had an interesting format. It seems long enough to make your beginning reader feel like she is reading a real book, but it's still illustrated, without chapters, and has a surprisingly large font. It's a very simple story about a little girl named Calpurnia, who lives with her parents and dog (Buggy Horse) in the forest of Florida. Everyone is suffering hard times, and her father has had no fish to sell at the market to support his family. An elderly neighbor tells Calpurnia of a secret river jumping with fish, so she sets off to find it to help the hard times in the forest become "soft times." Short and sweet, it was a pleasant read.
I didn't think I'd have too much to say about this one until I went online looking for a cover image and found much more information about this book. This was apparently the only book that Rawlings wrote specifically for children, and its manuscript was found among her papers and published posthumously. But, despite the fact that no indication was given in the text, there are other clues from the author's life that she had actually intended this story to be about a black child (despite the illustrations in the first edition). It was reissued in 2011, decades after its initial publication, in a beautiful illustrated volume with images much more true to the author's vision. The story has a timeless quality that will make it enjoyable even to a modern reader, and the illustrations should definitely draw an audience.
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