Golden Delicious Review

Thanks Booklist!  This review for my Golden Delicious book appeared in July of 2008:

This lively, true tale is set in the American heartland more than 100 years ago. The Stark brothers dream of cultivating the perfect new apple in their Missouri nursery, and farmers send them floods of varieties to try, but even fruits that look like royalty do not taste good. Then a poor farmer in the hills of West Virginia finds a new tree with Golden Delicious apples in his field, and he sends the fruit to the Starks.

At first the brothers are dismissive of the yellow apples until they taste them and find what they’ve been searching for.They rush by train and on horseback, find the tree, and graft twigs onto their own apple trees. Since then, Golden Delicious apples have become known as the queen of the apple world and billions have been harvested. A note fills in the botany, including how grafting works, and the folksy, colored-pencil illustrations, shaded with lots of earthy golds and greens, show the ordinary people who find glowing surprise.



-Booklist