Goldie Takes a Stand! Golda Meir’s First Crusade

Long before Sheryl Sandberg was encouraging women to lean in, the precocious Milwaukee fourth grader who would become Golda Meir was all over it. In the early 1900s, she formed a group of immigrant peers called the American Young Sisters Society and launched a campaign to buy textbooks for her impoverished classmates. Confident to her core (“I, Goldie Mabowehz, naturally appointed myself president”), Goldie doesn’t give up when various fund-raising strategies fall flat, and she eventually hits on the winning idea: a public meeting to rally support for the cause. Garrity-Riley gives her characters the placid, round faces and pink cheeks of vintage dolls, and this technique, along with her use of a single plane and sepia tones, doesn’t provide much visual momentum. First-time children’s author Krasner’s first-person narration matches her heroine’s forthrightness and fortitude, but it’s so effective that it undermines the story’s dramatic arc: readers may doubt that a dynamo like Goldie would get stage fright before giving a speech at the big event, or decide to “speak from my heart” instead of carefully rehearsing her pitch. Ages 5–9. Illustrator’s agency: Catugeau. (Sept.)