P is for Passover

by Tanya Lee Stone, Margeaux Lucas (Illustrator)

P is for Passover
Or Pesach, some say,
We celebrate freedom
On this holiday

In this new shaped alphabet book, families will enjoy learning about Passover! Every page contains a letter of the alphabet along with sweet, rhyming text that corresponds with each letter. And as an added bonus, at the end of the book is the complete story of Passover. This is a perfect introduction to the holiday!

Genres: Picture Books, Jewish, Childrens

32 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2003

About the author

Tanya Lee Stone is an award-winning author of books for kids and teens. Her work, which includes YA fiction (A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl), picture books (Elizabeth Leads the Way and Sandy's Circus), and nonfiction (Almost Astronauts and The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie) has won national awards such as the ALA's Sibert Medal, SCBWI's Golden Kite Award, YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction, Jane Addams Book Award Honor, Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor, NCTE's Orbus Pictus, and Bank Street's Flora Steiglitz Award. Forthcoming titles include Who Says Women Can't Be Doctors?! and The House that Jane Built (Holt 2013) and Courage Has No Color (Candlewick 2013).

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well to be honest, because Tanya Lee Stone's 2003 P is for Passover is an alphabet book, I was not jut intrigued but also more than a bit worried regarding whether I would enjoy Lee Stone's featured text and Margeaux Lucas's accompanying pictures (as from my own personal reading experiences, alphabet books can be delightful but they can also sadly be forgettable and sometimes even downright horrible). However and yes and indeed, P is for Passover is definitely and in my humble opinion a perfect, a marvellous example of an explanatory alphabet book for children from about the age of six to nine or so (and with explanatory alphabet book I mean to say that P is for Passover is not a book for children just learning and practicing their letters but is instead a book using the alphabet to show a specific theme, and with P is for Passover, said theme is of course the Jewish holiday of Passover/Pesach).

A nicely simple, rhyming, song like and importantly also more than thematically (and contents wise) adequate introduction to Passover (and to every facet of this important and significant Jewish holiday) is P is for Passover, with Tanya Lee Stone's A to Z format engagingly and even rather exuberantly showing, describing everything from how the Jews, how the Hebrews lead by Moses escaped from Egypt to how Passover is celebrated and the importance of the Seder meal alongside of the specific food symbols of the latter and of remembering and celebrating God through the agency of Moses delivering the Jews out of slavery. P is for Passover is informative without being textually overwhelming for the intended age group, and while Margeaux Lucas' pictures for P is for Passover are a bit too cartoon-like and as such too one dimensional for my personal aesthetic tastes, Lucas' illustrations do work really well with the author's printed words in P is for Passover, very nicely not only mirroring Tanya Lee Stone's letters of the alphabet sections but also often providing visual details regarding Passover that are either not included within the text proper or only alluded to (such as for example the Seder food symbols being both visually shown by Lucas and also labeled and that the hidden piece of matzah, that the Afikonen can actually be located almost anywhere in the house). Four stars for P is for Passover, warmly recommended, and indeed, the only reason for my rating not being five stars is that I do think Tanya Lee Stone should also be including a list of books on Passover for further reading and that a bit of a bibliography would definitely increase the educational (and in particular the research) value of P is for Passover.

[Sydney Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like these "A is for....." books because they have so much information in them. The only problem is I didn't find any back-matter to back up all this information. I have also never seen a Passover book, or a book celebrating many other religious holidays other than Christmas.

[Ellias · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an a-b-c book all about Passover. I liked it.

[Stephanie Smoot · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book to use to show students other holidays within the classroom.