One of the better books on the subject. Well illustrated and written. Well worth the price.

Mary Jelks MD has made an important contibution to the literature of allergy with this book. It is especially good for people in the Florida area. I am the author of Allergy-Free Gardening.

I have been looking everywhere for this book. I am a kindergarten teacher. I laughed out loud the first time I heard another teacher read this book. Now, I want it for my own baby. In this book, the boy keeps asking his dog to bring toys to the tub, until the dog jumps in himself.

Shell of wonder opened new doors for me. It was exciting and beautifully written. It was very imaginative and and was illsutrated quite well.

This book has a very cute storyline that appeals to my toddler and is a great way to learn some words for food and eating. The illustrations are beautiful and the hardcover is great quality. I highly recommend this book as well as the others in this series.

THE JAZZ MAN WAS A GREAT BOOK.IT HAD GREAT PICTURES.THE ARTIST WAS VERY ARTISTIC WITH THE PICTURES.I DON'T THINK IT WAS BORING AT ALL.

This book is one of the best books I've ever read and I'm 12 so it is for all ages and people.I've given this book 5 stars because it was so good.I wish I could buy it!I only read this book for my class novel to read,but it was still good.

Ok I thought the book was wonderful. It gave you so much detail.

First- It didn't matter whether he had a lame leg or not. He still got around what ever he did because he could walk up and down stairs.

Next- His mother and father didn't leave him. It was just a dream he had about his mother and father leaving him and there not being any food.

Then- He walks down the stairs andacross the street. He sees the jazz man, tony, Manuel, and Ernie plaing there instuments. He goes in to the resturtant and here's a voice and it sounds like his father. He looks up and it is his father.He wakes up and sees his father and mother.

That is my point of view of the jazz man.

In preparation for travels next year, my 4-year-old and I are attuning our ears to French. What's for Supper (along with other books in this Barron's series) is just our speed. Carol Thompson's appealing illustrations make it easy for a preschooler to "tell herself the story." Mary Risk's story of children buying groceries and preparing supper for their mother - a surprise! - keeps us turning pages, whether in English or French. The cassette is familiarizing us with the sounds, and the end-of-the-book phonetic spelling lists are polishing some of the rust off my encrusted college French. It will be possible to use these at developing levels, too. Right now we read the English, then the French on each page and listen to the tape doing the same. Later we can cover the English on the page and just read the French. And on the flip side of the cassette, we can hear the whole story in just English or in just French.

I usually love reading books written pre-20th Century, as this one was (1796) but I didn't really enjoy this one as much as I expected. Even though it caused a mild scandal when first published, it is (naturally) rather tame by today's standards. The heroine's great crime is to declare her love for a man before he declares his. How shocking!

The book is written as a series of letters to her beloved's son telling him about her great crime, in order to save him from making the same mistakes. I did admire the way she examined and analyzed her feelings, and how she could stand back and see how her actions didn't always coincide with her intentions. She just loved this guy passionately and she couldn't talk herself out of it, no matter how hard she tried. It got to be rather tedious though, after a while, and I wished she could just get over it and get on with her life.

All the melodrama in the book comes in the last thirty pages, which is such a contrast to the mild, slow-paced rest of the book. It seemed very foreign to the first part, like the author felt she ought to throw in some action at long last. All in all, it was okay, but not great.

Any fan of Mary Wollstonecraft should turn next to books like this one. Hays's novel is part of the first wave of responses to *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792) and shows that Wollstonecraft could produce thoughtful responses from British radicals that balance the unthinking ones from conservatives. With Amelia Opie's *Adeline Mowbray*, this novel tells us much about early British feminism and its interest in the novel.

Mary Hays, an early British feminist writers, was a contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and William Blake, and like them she was excited by the French Revolution and the prospect of toppling the privileged classes. Of course, at that time all men were comparatively privileged, at least as compared to women. In The Victim of Prejudice she mounts a twin attack on the lowly status of women within society and on the exalted status of the landed gentry, who still dominated life in that pre-industrial age. The former attack is fairly successful, the latter is not.

Mary Raymond, the heroine of the novel, is orphaned at an early age, but is raised and well-educated (perhaps too well for the time) by her guardian, Mr. Raymond. Two brothers, sons of the Honorable Mr. Pelham, come to Mr. Raymond's for instruction too, and Mary falls in love with William Pelham, and he with her. But Mary is an unacceptable match for such a wealthy youth, more unacceptable than she realizes until Mr. Raymond reluctantly reveals the sordid circumstances of her birth, and so the young lovers are separated.

Meanwhile, Sir Peter Osborne, the brutal local landowner, has taken a fancy to Mary and is reluctant to accept her protestations of his advances. In a symbol laden early scene, William coaxes the teenage Mary into stealing some "forbidden fruit" from Osborne's vineyard. But he catches her and expels her from the garden, calling her "a true daughter of Eve." In the ensuing years they have several more equally unfortunate encounters, with Osborne becoming ever more determined to have her. Finally, after the death of Mr. Raymond, who had tried to get her to accept a more appropriate marriage offer to no avail, has left Mary particularly vulnerable, with no money and nowhere to go, Osborne kidnaps and rapes her.

At this point William returns to the scene and finds Mary wandering, broken and ill. Though by now married to another, he nurses her back to health. But when he proposes that she become his mistress, the outraged Mary refuses and flees. She tries to find employment several places but finds that her reputation as a fallen woman, resulting not merely from the incident with Osborne but from her time with the married William, follows her, causing scandal and encouraging other men to be forward with her.

Throughout these various travails, she remains admirably loyal to the moral upbringing which Mr. Raymond provided :

'Let it come then!' exclaimed I with fervour; 'Let my ruin be complete! Disgrace, indigence, contempt, while unmerited, I dare encounter, but not the censure of my own heart. Dishonour, death itself, is a calamity less insupportable than self-reproach. Amidst the destruction of my hopes, the wreck of my fortunes, of my fame, my spirit still triumphs in conscious rectitude; nor would I, intolerable as is the sense of my wrongs and of my griefs, exchange them for all that guilty prosperity could bestow.'

but is quite annoyingly passive in the face of these injustices :

I revolved in my mind, selected, and rejected, as new obstacles occurred to me, a variety of plans. Difficulties almost insuperable, difficulties peculiar to my sex, my age, and my unfortunate situation, opposed themselves to my efforts on every side. I sought only the bare means of subsistence: amidst the luxuriant and the opulent, who surrounded me, I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist!

Somehow this ambition--mere existence-- just seems inadequate. More appropriate, particularly as long as her life is ruined anyway, would be to wreak a horrific vengeance on the reprehensible Lord Peter. But as the rather unfortunate title of the book indicates, this is a story about unrelenting victimization. And because Mary never really seeks to do more than exist, never even seeks redress against Osborne, she somehow makes herself a participant in her own victimization.

A system which would punish the victim rather than the rapist is so obviously unjust, that the purely feminist angle of the story does work to a degree. However, Osborne is so awful that it is hard to accept him as a genuinely representative figure of the British aristocracy. Eleanor Ty, editor of the Broadview Text edition of the book, suggests in her introduction that the character Osborne is intended as a specific rebuke to Edmund Burke and his conservative views on the value of ancient institutions like the aristocracy. Though I'm a fan of Burke, there are coherent arguments to be made in opposition to his theories : this is not one.

The book works well enough as a kind of Gothic thriller, and is adequate as a protofeminist tract, but it fails as a radical polemic against the prevailing institutions of the time. The existence of one evil fictional nobleman doesn't serve to turn 18th Century Britain into a den of horrors.

GRADE : C+

Mary Hays's "The Victim of Prejudice" is the story of Mary Raymond, a young woman, who, from birth, seems destined to suffer. The 'prejudice' of the title consists of unfair societal standards that exclude all but the wealthy, well-born, and influential. Mary is raised by her guardian, Mr. Raymond, on a small estate in the country, where he teaches her far more than any woman of her class and birth is expected to know by society.

From her youth, Mary is tormented and pursued by Sir Peter Osborne - a depraved example of the type of man Raymond warns Mary about that are out in the world. At Raymond's death, Mary is thrown out into that world to fend for herself, and the virtues and knowledge taught her by her guardian are all put to the test.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel "Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman," Hays short novel is a work meant to display feminist indignation at the treatment of women in the late 18th century. Also like Wollstonecraft, Hays appropriates some of the motifs of gothic fiction to underscore the extreme evils that men, law, and society are allowed to perpetrate against women. "The Victim of Prejudice" can tend toward melodrama, but is an important text of early British feminism and illustrates the domestic and personal concerns of the female Romantics.