Los Angeles Times
A Chair for My Mother was a Caldecott Honor book. Author/ illustrator Vera B. Williams tells of a young girl who, along with her waitress mother, saves coins in a jar. They want to buy a big, new, comfortable chair for their apartment, after losing all their furniture in a fire. A story of love and caring, accented with full-color illustrations with a pleasant, almost primitive quality.


Booklist, 11/82
A young girl tells how she, her mother, and her grandmother save up all of their spare coins in a big glass jar toward the day when they will buy a much-needed easy chair. (Their old furniture and their possessions were destroyed in a fire.) If the plot is scant-after the jar fills up, mother, daughter, and grandmother buy the chair and bring it home-the atmosphere of anticipation and family warmth is strong. Williams' illustrations are energetic watercolor paintings brimming with color and a cozy, indulgent expressionism. Intense roses, blues, yellows, and greens vie for attention in the pictures' blocky compositions, where natty patterning adds extra spice. A striking, offbeat backdrop for a loving story.


Kirkus Reviews, 10/82
A tender knockout-from the author/illustrator of, most recently and auspiciously, Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe. "My mother works as a waitress in the Blue Tile Diner," the little-girl narrator begins -- and to the accompaniment of vividly colored, direct, proto-primitive pictures -- the real, life-like story comes out. At home is a glass jar, into which goes all Mama's change from tips and the money Grandma saves whenever she gets a bargain at the market. "When we can't get a single other coin into the jar, we are going to take out all the money and go and buy a chair ... A wonderful, beautiful, fat, soft armchair." This is because -- we see as she tells it -- all the family's furniture burned up in a fire; and though neighbors and friends and relatives brought replacements (a buttercup-and-spring-green spread to contrast with the charred gray gloom just preceding), "we still have no sofas and no big chairs." Only straight, hard, kitchen chairs. Then the jar is full; the coins are rolled in paper wrappers, and exchanged for bills; and "Mama and Grandma and I" go shopping for the chair. This last sequence is a glory: Grandma feeling like Goldilocks, trying out all the chairs; the very rose-covered chair "we were all dreaming of," plump in the middle of the floor; the little girl and her mother, snuggled in it together ... and she can reach right up "and turn out the light if I fall asleep in her lap." It's rare to find so much vitality, spontaneity, and depth of feeling in such a simple, young book.


Book Description
After a fire destroys their home and possessions, Rosa, her mother, and grandmother save and save until they can afford to buy one big, comfortable chair that all three of them can enjoy.After their home is destroyed by a fire, Rosa, her mother and grandmother save their coins to buy a really comfortable chair for all to enjoy. "A superbly conceived picture book expressing the joyful spirit of a loving family."--Horn Book.


Card catalog description
A child, her waitress mother, and her grandmother save dimes to buy a comfortable armchair after all their furniture is lost in a fire.


About the Author
Vera B. Williams lives in New York City. In Her Own Words..."Throughout my childhood I was encouraged to make pictures, tell stories, act, and dance--all of this at a heaven in our New York City neighborhood called the Bronx House."Saturdays I painted with a crusading art director, Florence Cane. In her book The Growth of the Child Through Art, I appear under the name Linda. I was sixteen when the book appeared and embarrassed by it. But at age nine I had been totally proud when a painting of mine was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and I was later shown in the Movietone News explaining to Eleanor Roosevelt its Yiddish title, "Yentas.""In 1945 I went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a unique educational community. I graduated in 1949 in graphic art, which I studied with Josef Albers. Along the way I planted corn, made butter, worked on the printing press, and helped to build the house in which I lived with Paul Williams, a fellow student I married there."I wanted that connection of art and community to continue. And it did at the Gate Hill Cooperative, a community we built with other Black Mountain people, a poet, musicians, and potters. I lived and worked there from 1953-1970 (after which I moved to Canada). My children (Sarah, Jenny, Merce) grew up there. For them, we branched out into a school, part of the Surnmerhill movement. The gingerbread houses that led to my first book for Greenwillow I first made in sticky variety at our school. I have always liked to teach and have taught art, cooking, writing, nature study, for nursery age on."At forty-six, no longer married, living in a houseboat on the bay at Vancouver, British Columbia, I did my first book. But before that could happen, the fates decreed a stint of cooking and running a bakery at a small school in the Ontario countryside. My love affair with Canada included also a 500-mile trip on the Yukon River. Many of those adventures I put in Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe."I also write and draw for adults-short stories, leaflets, and posters. As a lover of children, I try to do what I can to help save their earth from nuclear disaster. This pursuit, too, has added its excitement to my biography, including, in 1981, a month's stay in the federal penitentiary in Alderson, West Virginia (an outcome of a women's peaceful blockade of the Pentagon). Perhaps this experience will some day appear in one of my books. So far I've found children's books a wonderfully accommodating medium where any of my various activities might pop up."

ANNOTATION

A child, her waitress mother, and her grandmother save dimes to buy a comfortable armchair after all their furniture is lost in a fire.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The jar of coins is full. The day has come to buy the chair—the big, fat, comfortable, wonderful chair they have been saving for. The chair that will replace the one that was burned up—along with everything else—in the terrible fire.

A book of love and tenderness filled with the affirmation of life.

The jar of coins is full. The day has come to buy the chair - the big, fat, comforable, wonderful chair they have been saving for. The chair that will replace the one that was burned up - along with everything else - in the terrible fire.

A book of love and tenderness filled with the affirmation of life.

Author Biography: Vera B. Williams lives in New York City.

FROM THE CRITICS

Children's Literature - Deborah Zink Roffino