Today while Jake was in his little story time at the library, I sat under a window in the sunshine with Finn, looking at books while he crawled around.  I was sitting by the "Y's" and started reading books by Jane Yolen, who wrote the incredible book, "The Devil's Arithmetic."  I have long admired her, and even have a book autographed by her, thanks to my book-loving, librarian mother-in-law, Linda.  Anyway, I picked up her book called Letting Swift River Go.  It is amazing.  I hope you will check it out.

What Jane Yolen says about the book:  "I had lived in the Connecticut River Valley for a number of years, and had known (and visited) that lovely created wilderness, the Quabbin Reservoir. But I hadn't known the human story behind it until the local newspaper did an article. It seems that in the late '30s, the people of the Swift River Valley towns had sold their property and therefore their futures to Boston. Boston, it seems, had a long thirst. Trees and buildings were removed, the people relocated, and then the entire area was drowned to make a reservoir for the folk of Boston, sixty miles to the east. At first I thought I wanted to write a novel. I had a picture in my head of a girl in a boat looking over her drowned town. Eventually (about five years later) that picture in my head became the last scene in the picture book. Barbara Cooney's illustrations are a gift, each one stunningly perfect."

What reviewers have said: "Yolen's poetic narration, in the voice of a woman who was six years old when her family learned they would have to give up their home, recalls the tranquillity of a rural community where children fished in the river and picnicked in the graveyard. ... Cooney's luminous, exquisitely designed watercolors, in tenderly glowing colors, focus on carefully selected details, like loving memories that retain only the most significant particulars. ...A lovely book about reconciling necessary change with the enduring value of what is lost." -- Kirkus Reviews