The True Story of George

Carol L. MacKay is a children’s librarian living in Bawlf, Alberta.

Katie and Mackenzie find a stiff plastic toy figure washed up on the
beach. Unimpressed by its lack of bells and whistles, the siblings put
the little toy man through a series of trials. It gets dunked and
abandoned in a jug of windshield washer fluid, thrown from a
second-storey window attached to a homemade parachute, buried under the
snow, taken to school, and tied to a fireworks rocket.

What Katie and Mackenzie don’t know is that their plastic toy,
George, has a personality, and a mighty optimistic one at that.
Torontonian Ingrid Lee has created a wonderfully imaginative character
in George, who sees these tribulations as grand adventures. The chapters
of the book skilfully alternate between George’s take on the action,
and Katie and Mackenzie’s viewpoint. Through the George chapters,
readers learn that he is something of a renaissance man: not only an
explorer, adventurer, and athlete but the type of individual who takes
the opportunity to learn about literature and art from the pocket of
Katie’s school backpack.

Stéphane Denis’s black-and-white illustrations mesh perfectly with
the action and comical tone of the story.

Short sentences, interesting word choices, and episodic chapter plots
make this a manageable story for newly independent readers. But with a
fun, creative storyline, and an endearing main character in George, it
suddenly becomes the ideal: a chapter book that makes youngsters want to
read on. Highly recommended.