Falker, watching her draw, whispers, “This is brilliant. Or the best at anything”-is contradicted when Trisha is the object of praise: Mr. Falker’s implicit sense of fairness-“Right from the start, it didn’t seem to matter to Mr. Falker (complete with a classroom version of a “He who is without sin among you” scene) is mawkish. Falker and Miss Plessy had tears in their eyes.” The extent to which Trisha limns her own misery and deifies Mr. Although the perspective is supposed to be Trisha’s, many sentences give away the adult viewpoint, e.g., “She didn’t notice that Mr. A thank-you to a teacher who made a difference is always welcome, but this one is unbearably sentimental. Falker silences the children who taunt Trisha, and begins, with a reading teacher, to help her after school. She can draw well, but is desperately frustrated by math and reading. Trisha begins kindergarten with high hopes, but as the years go by she becomes convinced she is dumb. Ages 5-9.An autobiographical tribute to Polacco’s fifth-grade teacher, the first adult to recognize her learning disability and to help her learn to read. This will encourage the child who feels like a failure and the teacher who cares. Trisha isn't idealized: we see her messy and desperate, poring over her books.

As always she tells the story with intense emotion: no understatement here reading is 'torture.' The big line-and-watercolor illustrations are bright with color and theatrical gesture, expressing the child's happiness with her grandparents in a family of readers, her fear and loneliness in the classroom ('she hated hated hated school'), her anguish when the kids jeer at her in the schoolyard, and her joy when finally she reads the words on the page ('she was happy, so very happy').

'That little girl was me,' Polacco says in a final note. Who would believe that this gifted storyteller had started off with a serious learning disability? From kindergarten on, Trisha gets attention because she can draw but she hides the fact that she can't read-all she sees on the page are 'wiggling shapes' -until her fifth-grade teacher discovers Trisha's problem, gets her special help, and sets her free. Like many of Polacco's picture-book stories, this one is autobiographical.

Thank mr falker