Boston Tea Party

I had mixed feelings about this book while reading it. While this book offers great information about the Boston tea party, I didn’t like how it was written. This book starts off with one line and a new line gets added on each page. It gets to be extremely repetitive and it got to the point where I wasn’t reading the whole page. Repetition is good for many books such as nursery rhymes, but not when writing about a historical event. Despite the repetition in the text, the book offers a good timeline of the events that took place during the Boston tea party. The one thing I do like about this book are the characters. The book brings up the people who were important in the Boston tea party. However, throughout the book there are cute show more tiny mice at the bottom of each page. The mice add comments about what is going on in the above picture. They would state their opinions and facts about the situation. For example, one of the mice states, “I say! Let’s tax the Americans for the sugar and tea they import” (Edwards, p. 6). In the above picture shows King George III declaring that tea will be taxed. I enjoyed reading the mice’s comments because they are helpful and some are humorous. The big idea in this book is to provide the reader with information about the Boston tea party. show less

Edwards uses parallel structure, "This is" and "These are," to tell the story of the Boston Tea Party. While the information given on each page is direct and seemingly unbiased, Edwards uses the presence of mice on each page to provide colorful commentary for each action. For instance, on the page where "This is the king...who taxes tea," the mice's conversation, told through bubbles, is, "Oh, no! Is he taxing cheese, too?" Edwards concludes the narrative with a pictorial timeline of the events leading up to and the events following the American Revolutionary War, and considering that this text is probably intended for younger readers, the timeline is important to help them understand that there were other reasons why the colonies went show more to war.

This text could be used in an American literature class to provide historical context and climate for students studying literature of the Revolution (Common Sense, the Declaration, etc.), but it could be used in any English class to teach the value and power of parallel construction in writing. show less

I didn't really like this book. Yes it has great information about what happened for the Boston Tea party but it started to get repetitive and its not just a few words that are repeated it it takes the sentence from the previous page and they just add a few extra words to the beginning then the same sentences are repeated. I don't think that really made sense. I get its a children's book and its trying to get the information to the kids so they can remember it but I don't like the way its doing it. I found the little mice talking to each other on each page more interesting than the actual information.