PICTURE BOOK - Pop's Bridge by Eve Bunting

Illustrated by C. F. Payne

2006, Houghton Mifflin

32 pgs.

Goodreads rating: 4.07 - 210 ratings

My rating:  5

Endpapers:  Dark Evergreen

1^st line/s:  "My pop is building the Golden Gate Bridge.  Almost every day after school Charlie Shu and I go to Fort Point and watch."

My comments:  I am so fond of this book...I've read it many times, to myself and aloud to different groups of kids.  Last week I read it aloud to a group of nine to twelve-year-olds that were attending the "Bridges" STEM camp that I was facilitating, and it delighted me once again.  I love the Golden Gate Bridge.  I never saw it or drove over it until about 15 years ago when I went to visit a dear friend in Marin County, California.  Since that first visit there have been at least two visits a year, and we always drive at least one back-and-forth trip over "my" bridge.  My friend's mom was one of the thousands of people who walked across the span on opening day in 1937.  She's told me the story several times.  This is a wonderful book of two friends and the dads who built the Golden Gate Bridge.

Goodreads:  The Golden Gate Bridge. The impossible bridge, some call it. They say it can't be built.
          But Robert's father is building it. He's a skywalker--a brave, high-climbing ironworker. Robert is convinced his pop has the most important job on the crew . . . until a frightening event makes him see that it takes an entire team to accomplish the impossible.
          When it was completed in 1937, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was hailed as an international marvel. Eve Bunting's riveting story salutes the ingenuity and courage of every person who helped raise this majestic American icon.
Includes an author's note about the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.