cover image Goldie Takes a Stand! Golda Meir’s First Crusade

Goldie Takes a Stand! Golda Meir’s First Crusade

Barbara Krasner, illus. by Kelsey Garrity-Riley. Kar-Ben, $17.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-4677-1200-2

Long before Sheryl Sandberg was encouraging women to lean in, the precocious Milwaukee fourth grader who would become Golda Meir was all over it. In the early 1900s, she formed a group of immigrant peers called the American Young Sisters Society and launched a campaign to buy textbooks for her impoverished classmates. Confident to her core (“I, Goldie Mabowehz, naturally appointed myself president”), Goldie doesn’t give up when various fund-raising strategies fall flat, and she eventually hits on the winning idea: a public meeting to rally support for the cause. Garrity-Riley gives her characters the placid, round faces and pink cheeks of vintage dolls, and this technique, along with her use of a single plane and sepia tones, doesn’t provide much visual momentum. First-time children’s author Krasner’s first-person narration matches her heroine’s forthrightness and fortitude, but it’s so effective that it undermines the story’s dramatic arc: readers may doubt that a dynamo like Goldie would get stage fright before giving a speech at the big event, or decide to “speak from my heart” instead of carefully rehearsing her pitch. Ages 5–9. Illustrator’s agency: Catugeau. (Sept.)