Maggie’s Treasure
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
When Maggie’s treasure collection grows too big to manage, she finds a creative solution.
Maggie finds treasure wherever she goes. Whether it’s a button, a feather or a shiny stone, she picks it up and takes it home. At first the neighbors and city workers are grateful to Maggie for cleaning up; the mayor even gives her an award. But over time Maggie’s collection grows bigger and bigger, until it spills out of her house and garden in an unsightly mess. Her parents tell her “Enough treasure!” and eventually even Maggie realizes that something must be done. Finally, inspired by a bird outside her window, she finds a way to share her treasure that enchants and transforms the entire neighborhood.
Jon-Erik Lappano and Kellen Hatanaka, winners of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Tokyo Digs a Garden, have created a stunning picture book about a child who turns her passion for collecting into a pleasure for her community.
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.2
Retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maggie, a brown-skinned girl in roomy overalls, sees "the sparkle in everything," finding treasures "a dropped button, a bottle cap, a bright red feather" in others' trash. Mistaking her gathering as an effort at litter collection, the community initially cheers the girl's deeds; the mayor even rewards her with a ribbon. But when her assemblage overwhelms her family's house and her work leaves the sanitation department with nothing to do, Maggie must find a way to redistribute her trove. Inspired by nature, she does so in style, helping her community to see the beauty in banality transformed. In the creative team's second collaboration (Tokyo Digs a Garden), Lappano balances a sound environmental message with an alliterative, lyrical text and humorous touches a gag in which three underemployed sanitation workers resort to grooming squirrels becomes all the funnier when the squirrels rebel. In blocky shapes of bold, flat color, Hatanaka's stylized digital illustrations portray characters with impossibly long limbs and necks who gesture exaggeratedly. An engaging appeal to reduce and reuse with a decidedly DIY aesthetic. Ages 3 7.
