It isn’t every book that earns a review in PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY, the the international news website and print magazine of book publishing and bookselling, but Dorie McCullough Lawson’s charming new children’s book TEX has done it, and done it well.
Here’s what PW had to say:
“Certain childhood dreams are elemental—growing up to be a firefighter, a ballerina, or a cowboy—and adult author Lawson, in her first children’s book, taps into that third option with a photographic ode to a boy’s imagined life on the ranch. Lawson begins by introducing readers to Luke (her son), who first appears in grayscale photos. ‘He lives in a house near the ocean…. But Luke imagines he is… Tex.’ Color photographs, on the right side of each spread, portray Tex as one serious cowpoke, wearing a jean shirt, boots, and a black brimmed hat against an expansive landscape of mountains and ‘wide open spaces.’ Spare prose plays into the taciturn image of a cowboy on the job (‘All day long Tex works hard. He rides. He irrigates. He checks fence’), and even with her son in the starring role, Lawson avoids both cutesiness and the feel of a vanity project, focusing on the simple pleasures of hard work and a job well done. The seriousness with which the book takes Tex’s role on the ranch validates children’s dreams and ambitions. Ages 3–5.”
Dorie, wife of renowned painter T. Allen Lawson and daughter of two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian David McCullough, will also appear at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, in late September. Watch the TSB website for details regarding her appearance there, including reading and signing times.
TSB recently traveled to Wyoming and visited the Wymont Ranch outside of Sheridan, where the book TEX is set. You can read more about it on our TSB Riding Adventures blog (click HERE).
Watch for TEX in your local bookstore in October, 2011, or preorder your copy now at the TSB online bookstore, where shipping in the US is always FREE.