"Swamp Angel"

Swamp Angel
Written by: Anne Isaacs
Illustrated by: Paul O. Zelinsky
Published in 1994 by Puffin Books in NY
Genre: Traditional Literature--Tall Tale
Ages: Grades K-2
Awards: Caldecott Honor Book

Summary: This book is about an extremely tall young lady named Angelica Longrider, or Swamp Angel. She is of a quite unusual size for a human and is very confident in her abilities. One day she decides to sign up in a contest to win the prize for killing a bear that has tormented her town for years named Thundering Tarnation. Everyone says that getting rid of this bear is man's work, but the men find out how intelligent and strong this bear is and soon Swamp Angel is the only one left to fight the bear. She struggles through many trials and tribulations, but she ultimately defeats the bear--by accident!

Response: I did not quite know what to expect from this book when I first picked it up, but I was happily surprised that it was a feminist approach to heroism. I liked the book because it showed a girl as a hero to her town. Normally men get these exciting roles in books, but this time the fame went to a girl heroine!

All three types of characters that are traditionally found in this type of literature are present in this work. Swamp Angel is the hero (heroine), Thundering Tarnation is the rival, and a tree is the helper.

Most of the pictures in this work are double page spreads of watercolor and many of them are oval-shaped. Every picture has remarkable color. They are well-defined, yet of medium tone, except that the sky in each picture and anything in black shine through with amazing depth and clarity. All of the pictures are set within a border that resembles a tree trunk to reiterate that this story takes place in the forest. Forest settings are said to depict wild and dangerous things, and Thundering Tarnation certainly is that!

There exist a lot of very humorous aspect to this story, which make it very interesting. Swamp Angel's size is one of those humorous qualities as is the community though that waiting until she was two years old to build her first log cabin was a long time to wait, and having her pick up a raincloud and move it over a burning house to stifle the flame. She even used a tornado to help lasso Thundering Tarnation and drank an entire lake full of water when the bear was fighting with her! The character's names in this work are also quite humorous. Angelica receives the name of "Swamp Angel" because she rescued several wagons from Dejection Swamp and one woman called her an angel for her assistance. Thundering Tarnation gets his name from the words commonly used when he was spotted in the town.

There are several great similes in this work that stood out to me. Two of my favorites are: "To this day, stories about Swamp Angel spring up like sunflowers along the wagon trail" (5) and "Swamp Angel...swung the twister around like a giant lasso in the heavens" (16). Great similies make a reader see the image the author is trying to convey in one's mind. I certainly believe that Anne Isaacs accomplishes this with her similies!

The very end of the story seems to me to make it a little like a Pourquoi Tale because it says that Swamp angel took her bear pelt to Montana and it became the Shortgrass Prairie and that one can still see the imprint the bear made when she threw him into the sky. as a constellation. Because it seems to explain these things, I think this work might also be considered a Pourquoi Tale.

Teaching Connections: A great thing to do with this book is to bring in more traditional stories where the main characters are male heroes and compare and contrast those stories to this one. I believe that children will be able to easily identify numerous characteristics within this book that are similar and some that are unique as well. I think it is important to encourage the girls in the the class as well as the boys and give them literary examples of how they are heroes too!

A teacher could also use this book as an example of great similes in a language arts lesson.

Other teaching ideas are offered on Anne Isaac's website.

(Image retrieved from http://annettelamb.com/library/s/swamp_angel.jpg on 4 April 2008)