"There was an old woman who lived in a shoe./She had so many children, she didn't know what to do./She gave them some broth without any bread,/Then took them to live in a new home instead..." So begins Alison Jackson's creative and humorous twist on the old classic Women in the Shoe nursery rhyme. The poor woman and her enormous brood try out a myriad of places, including the cat and the fiddle's hat, Humpty Dumpty's wall, Little Miss Muffet's teacup, Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard, and Hickory Dickory Dock's clock, but no place feels right. And so in the end "...If the shoe fits, then wear it," she said to her clan./And she led them right back where this story began..." Ms Jackson's energetic, rhyming, chain of events story is filled with familiar nursery rhyme characters, and little ones will revel in all the fun of identifying old friends and remembering their verses. Karla Firehammer's engaging illustrations, in soft pastel tones, are rich in entertaining details and marvelous facial expressions. Perfect for preschoolers, If The Shoe Fits is a wonderful, fun-filled romp kids will want to read again and again, and is sure to become an instant favorite at your house.

As probably all the people interested in this book know, finding instruction the Viol is difficult. If you do find instruction, you will also most likely find that it is quite expensive. Luckily, Alison Crum has taken the step to solve this problem with her books. In it, she covers all the major topics in vivid detail, from how to hold the viol to proper fingering. Her detailed analysis covers the information you would have to find in a number of other books, written in Elizabethan English.

If you are considering learning to play the Viol and have a budget to consider, I recommend her books to train yourself and save a pretty penny!

Hi.I recently read Cranes Rebound and found that it is a really great book.I am 13 and in the 7th grade and i still liked this book.It definetly inspired me to go and read more books by Alison Jackson!

Crane's Reboud was a real good book! It is about boy that goes to basketball camp . a lot of things happend that are real funny . People in my class even liked it. Cheak out this other book by Alison jackson ,My Brother the Star.

You should read Crane's Rebound. It is an exciting book! Once you start to read it you can't put it down. It's about this boy at basketball camp that keeps getting in trouble with other kids. You won't even guess what happened there. I really liked this book and that's why I gave it five stars. Kids in my class even liked it a lot.

My children enjoyed this book emensely! Wonderful illustrations ! A new "Thanksgiving read" tradition!

*Hilarious* is the only word to describe this picture book which is a take off of the classic "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.

When an "old lady" comes to Thanksgiving dinner she swallows a pumpkin pie--whole. To wash down the pie (which was really too dry) she gulps some cider which "rumbles and mumbles and grumbles" inside her. Then to the horror of the adults and the delight of the children she gobbles the entire Thanksgiving feast!

The illustrations cap off the delightful text and add even more fantastic humor as the old lady grows in proportion with each outlandish bite.

A must read for story time--kids will be giggling more with every turn of the page. And you'll be "thankful" you don't have such a relative. Or do you?

Karma Wilson

My children and I live this story. It became more fantastical as it went on and when Judy's illustrations display the woman as a Thansgiving parade balloon, it got raves of laughter from the kids! The details of the pictures add to the story. The dead mouse was fun to look for on each page!

The story is strongest when she is most generous to her characters and most fully shares her own story within theirs. At times, she writes out of her anger at those who hurt her friends, at them for not staying true to love and beauty, and at the world for its unhappiness. She doesn't have nearly enough distance from JM's spaghetti western svengali and DJ's young black hustlers to write about them for publication.

How could two so full of love have come to such a sad end? The answer, it seems at times, is that gay marriage in our world doesn't have the structuring social context to do the work we expect from marriage. But we need to know more about her, her own loves, her children and her novels in order to speak honestly with her about the long haul.

The ouija board saves the marriage by holding it together under the burden of professional success and failure. And it destroys them both. It ruins JM as a poet -- he writes a beautiful "Book of Ephraim," then two more fat, quick and unreflective books of spirit-writing, then not much else. It draws them away from friends and life into a compelling fantasy they only partly believe in, are afraid of, and that becomes gradually coarser and uglier. As she sees it, James dies bewildered and ruined, while David loses his mind and soul to the devils.

She paints beautiful, vivid portraits of her friends in their youth.

Alison Lurie celebrates friendship in her memoir of James Merrill, poet, and David Jackson. Her account covers the career trajectories of the two men. She describes their adventures with unknown spirits and the subsequent work product in the Sandover poems. Her description of the lives of the two and the houses they occupied in Key West are particularly alluring. She makes the outcomes of drug and alcohol abuse and an interest in the rough trade on the one hand, and an increasing diffidence and squeamishness on the part of Merrill on the other hand comprehensible and not at all unusual in that individual characters do undergo changes in the course of a span of life.

A memoir is not a biography, as Lurie reminds us at the beginning of her book. One should be grateful for the revelations that are given, and there are many. Perhaps one should be cheered by seeing the sort of defensiveness a beloved author can arouse, but if the reviewers picked up the book they presumably wanted to "get inside," and that is where Lurie takes us. Who wants the sugar-coated anyway? Lurie opens a door on a rather Gothic menage, a very energized and energizing union, which dilapidated all too predictably into disunion and the cliched gay search for May-December love on the Greek travel plan. She writes with candor, but acknowledges the many missing spaces, temporal and informational lacunae, in her decades of friendship with these fellow authors. Her critical exegesis of the poetry is quite good for a novelist unpracticed in such analysis, and she raises some fair, troubling questions about the content of "Sandover." The Ouija board seemingly acted as a tap for the unconscious thoughts and wishes of its authors, and we find some of these messages, not all of which are palatable, give one insight into the infrastructure of creative sensibility. Ugliness and egotism are part and parcel. Overall, Merrill and Jackson are depicted as serious, generous artists who immeasurably enriched the lives of those around them. Of course, there are faults too, some of them egregious. Several reviewers acknowledge--rather ungraciously--the veracity of Lurie's claim that Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover" was produced jointly by Merrill and Jackson, via their rather Dantean peregrinations on the Ouija board. I would ask the Merrill idolators this: if J.M. himself could acknowledge David Jackson as co-creator of "Sandover" in subsequent interviews, why could he not put his lifelong lover's name on the spine of the Pulitzer-winning volume? The charges in other reviews that Lurie is magnifying her own reputation through her friendship with Merrill are shallow and spurious; there is not a single self-aggrandizing sentence in the entire volume, and that is a first for the many memoirs I have read. If anything, Lurie is self-deprecating and respectful of the rigors and liabilities of the artistic life. This book is not the typical memoir but a serious and respectful study of two artistic souls locked in a Narcissus-embrace which ended--as it must--with the mirror permanently distorted.