By Sharony Green
Olympia Publishers, 2023
Bumblebee Paperback Edition: L8.99 UK, $10.84 Amazon
Genre: Children’s Fiction
Reviewed by Karen Hilgartner
Follow Delores Rayshell Ravine as she tags along with her “Aunt Better,” an aspiring actor currently doing “day work” as a housekeeper for a successful young fashion designer, Miss Oona Levine. Author and historian Sharony Green takes the reader on a day in the life of young Delores when her Aunt Betty, who she accidentally named Aunt “Better” when she was three, gets called to a long-awaited audition and Miss Oona steps in to babysit. High fashion, fancy restaurants, and day spas are in store for Delores in this delightful little book.
Alliteration and rhyme carry the reader along as if in a dance:
So every day, Aunt Better and Delores stepped fine
To the home of Miss Oona, a lady divine
Who got dressed every morning at half past nine
Because she’d been up all night
Making pretty dresses with exquisite designs
For famous people like Beatrix Boujoulere,
The Duchess of Havenshine.
Green’s character personalities are evident in their music and fashion choices. Delores’ mother, a teacher, wears finger waves and fancies Mao jackets. Her Aunt Sarah, a dentist, wears tailored slacks like Hepburn and sings soprano in the church choir. Aunt Better, the oldest of the three sisters, who listens to Janet Jackson and paints her nails pale blue each morning, chooses her audition outfits from a wardrobe of Miss Oona’s cast-offs and states, “I won’t be cleaning houses all my life.” And sure thing, while “singing, sassin’, and sometimes laughing” she hears the phone begin to “ring, ring!” Her audition call comes in.
In Aunt Better’s Day Work, Green highlights the importance of women of all ages following their dreams, with the support and encouragement of others, wherever they may be on their path. She dedicates this book to her grandmother, her mother, and her aunt, for “teaching me how fashion and our dreams can always uplift our weary spirits.”
Dr. Sharony Green serves as Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she divides her time between teaching, writing, and creative pursuits, including filmmaking.
Karen Hilgartner is an Alabama native, raised in a family of oral storytellers. She has spent most of her life teaching the very young how to read, write their own stories, and become immersed in the wonders of the world around them.
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