The Books

The Table Where Rich People Sit

by Byrd Baylor
Illustrated by Peter Parnall

One Potato Review

Weird, talky and ecstatic. From 1994: “I hate to bring this up,” says a girl to her hippie farmer parents, “but it would help if you both had a little more ambition.” What follows is sort of a balance sheet – the worth in hard dollars of witnessing nature: the call of an owl, the feel of the wind, the smell of the rain, but mostly the colors. With plain white backgrounds and watercolor figures containing bears and wolves and geological formations, this looks (and sounds) like nothing else in children’s picture books today. No pandering here. For older, more sophisticated readers.