ANNOTATION

Photographs with brief text chronicle a seven-month stay at a homeless shelter where a ten-year-old girl felt scared at first but later felt safe.

FROM THE CRITICS

School Library Journal

K-Gr 3-Life in the Cornerstone Community Outreach Center, a shelter for women and children in Chicago, is presented through the eyes of a young girl who has just arrived. Through very simple language; short, declarative sentences; and a montage of photographs presented in quasi-collage format, she offers her impressions of shelter life. The book clearly seeks to demystify and de-stigmatize the experience, and casts as positive a light as possible on the residents. The black-and-white photographs (occasionally tinted) display a diverse population, and many of them show strong emotions as well. For the most part they correspond well to the brief text on each page. A lot of questions, however, remain unanswered. The economic circumstances of the narrator's family, whose belongings are in storage while they wait for a new apartment, remain vague. Despite the superficial nature of the text, the book humanizes and individualizes an aspect of life about which children have many questions and fears and about which there is little appropriate information available. This book has a slightly different focus than Curt and Gita Kaufman's Hotel Boy (Atheneum, 1987).-Linda Greengrass, Bank Street College Library, New York City