Reviews

Ballywhinney Girl by Eve Bunting

lee_hillshire's review

The prose part of it is nice. The illustrations kind of disappointed me though. I really liked the beginning, where the body is never shown, and no piece of it is. With the theme of the book, that seemed like such a strong way to reinforce that theme through the illustrations. But then it shows the feet, the hands, the head, and the whole body, by pieces. And that makes me very sad. I could have liked this book a whole lot more than I did.

optimaggie's review

5.0

What a tender and sweet look at the questions that might come up if a young child found a mummy, long buried, in a bog. I cried reading this book aloud to my son, it was written in such a beautiful and thoughtful way. It was an extension to our Ireland studies but really it was almost more fitting for our prehistory studies as it unobtrusively asks the question, what should be treated as sacred and what should be treated as science/history? A big and beautiful question for children to think about when they are studying the past and the discoveries that have been made.

nairam1173's review

challenging emotional informative medium-paced

4.75

Review 6 October 2018:

The meter of the text is not my favorite, but this is a picture book about bog bodies! And the ethics of displaying human remains! Amazing.

maidmarianlib's review

3.0

A simple story about two girls from very different times who connect with one another. Could have used more emotion from the text and the illustrations only show the mundane parts of the story. Great connections to the novel Bog Child though, and lots of nonfiction as well.

jen87's review against another edition

2.0

Any book with the discovery of a dead body in the first page generally loses me. This was an interesting story, but centers around the discovery of a mummy in Ireland on a family farm. Very dark. Not for the feint of heart. I'd say ages 8 and up... Pretty illustrations though.