To the Post Office with Mama

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Shea, a little boy, is accompanying his mother to the post office. He
puts on his winter clothes. He walks along the sidewalk. He helps mail a
letter. He helps his mother check their mail box. He grows tired and
falls asleep while being carried home. And that, pretty much, is it.

If you know a child who is into preschool modernist literature, this
book could be a real find. Author Sue Farrell has managed to avoid the
pitfall of having a plot take over her story by not providing one. The
result is a children’s book sustained only by the grainy everyday
truths of walking to a prairie post office. “There is the place where
grown-ups wash clothes,” Farrell writes. “I clean snow off a bench.
I stand up on the seat to look at the woman inside. Her clothes are
going around and around in a dryer. ‘Hurry up, Shea. Come this way,’
says Mama.”

If Papa Hemingway had written children’s fiction, this would be the
way he would have written it. Not to everyone’s taste. Recommended
with reservations.