The country is at war with itself, and a woman in a widow’s bonnet sits at her desk with one more letter. She signs it, folds it, slides it into an envelope, writes the president’s name and address on the front and sticks on a stamp. Then, in two short lines set alone on the page, she waits, and waits again. Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson builds its whole story toward that pause, and the page turn that follows, with Abraham Lincoln’s huge, weary face rising out of the smoke of battle, is the best moment in the book.
The woman is Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book and author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, and the letter asks for a single national day of thanks. By the time it reaches Lincoln, four earlier presidents have said no.
Thank You, Sarah and the Kitchen-Table Campaign
What the book understands best is that Hale’s weapon was ordinary. Her life is shown in domestic scenes stretched to comic size. One spread finds her writing by candlelight with her children asleep around her, the bedclothes drifting into heaps of bundled letters addressed to the White House. When Americans start ignoring the holiday, the narrator reports that it “just curdled her gravy,” and the jokes in Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson stay in that register of pies, stuffing and skillets.
The kitchen turns political in the best spread of the middle section. Hale asks her readers for help, and the women of America drop their babies, hoes and washing to pick up pens. Matt Faulkner draws a farm wife sprinting downhill with a letter held high, a toddler left reading beside a butter crate, and an ink bottle the size of a barrel. The joke is affectionate, and it makes a serious point for young readers: a crowd of people writing letters can move governments.
The presidents get rougher treatment. James Buchanan appears as a vast, troubled forehead with tiny men in top hats scaling his hair, waving placards for abolition on one side and secession on the other. The Civil War arrives as soldiers fighting across giant stone letters spelling UNITED STATES, the masonry cracked down the middle. For an audience in the early grades, the device in Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson is a clever way to show a nation coming apart without dwelling on bloodshed, though the battle pages are noisy, and the very youngest may need an adult beside them.
The Real Woman Is in the Back of the Book
The story’s chant of bold, brave, stubborn and smart turns Hale into a cartoon champion, and the effect is fun but flattening. Readers who stop at the last illustrated page would never guess that she opposed votes for women, believed men and women had separate spheres, and admired Queen Victoria as a model of public influence through private virtue.
The notes after the story say all of this plainly. In the illustrated pages of Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson, Hale is a crusader. The essay that follows shows a conservative editor who pushed hard for girls’ schools and women doctors while declining the label of reformer. That tension is the most interesting thing about her, and the picture-book half leaves it entirely to the prose half.
The historical notes earn credit elsewhere too. A timeline of 1863 sets Lincoln’s proclamation beside the Draft Riots, the Gettysburg Address and the forced march of the Navajo to a prison camp, so the year of national thanks does not appear unclouded. The weakness lies at the very start. Two opening spreads present the Pilgrim feast as the thing everyone already knows, with Native guests in generic costume and no nation named, and the story then moves on to its real subject without looking back. Families who want the Wampanoag side of 1621 will need a second book, and Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story, from Wampanoag authors, is the natural companion.
Why Thank You, Sarah Reads Like a Thank-You Note
The title is itself a thank-you note, and the closing spread delivers it. A long modern table runs into the distance under parade balloons, crowded with families of every background passing dishes, and a cartoon dinosaur balloon carries a banner of congratulations for Sarah. It turns the day’s gratitude toward a person, which makes Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson a useful book to read the night before the holiday, when children can be asked who else deserves thanking at their own table.
The Writer and the Artist Behind It
Laurie Halse Anderson began as a freelance journalist, including a spell at The Philadelphia Inquirer, in the city where Hale spent her final years. She later became one of the most decorated writers for young people in the country, winning the Margaret A. Edwards Award for her teen novels and the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction for Chains, her novel of an enslaved girl in revolutionary New York. That historian’s habit shows in Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson through its sources list, which runs from Hale’s own etiquette book to a history of her New Hampshire hometown.
Faulkner, who has been illustrating children’s books since the mid-1980s and has more than thirty titles to his name, notes on the copyright page that he began work on these drawings soon after the attacks of September 2001, and that Hale’s tenacity gave him comfort in a hard season. Knowing that adds weight to the final table full of strangers.
After the Last Page
The book is not a balanced biography, and it does not pretend to be. It is a rousing story about writing letters, told with enough mischief to hold a restless room, and Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson ends by telling children directly that they can lobby, petition and write to editors without being old enough to vote. Readers who want more Thanksgiving with the same New England warmth can follow it with An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott, and families looking for gratitude through a Cherokee lens will find it in Traci Sorell’s We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga.
Hale wrote for half a century. This book makes the case that a single envelope can still matter.