Starred Review ALA Booklist (Sat Oct 01 00:00:00 CDT 1994)

Starred Review Forget those images of angelic maidens, ethereal and demure. Angelica Longrider is the greatest woodswoman in Tennessee. She can lasso a tornado. She can toss a bear into the sky so hard that it is still on the way up at nightfall. She snores like a locomotive in a thunderstorm. Isaacs tells her original story with the glorious exaggeration and uproarious farce of the traditional tall tale and with its typical laconic idiom--you just can't help reading it aloud. The heroine was nothing special as a newborn baby (scarcely taller than her mother and couldn't climb a tree without help . . . She was a full two years old before she built her first log cabin). Zelinsky's detailed oil paintings in folk-art style are exquisite, framed in cherry, maple, and birch wood grains. They are also hilarious, making brilliant use of perspective to extend the mischief and the droll understatement. Sweetfaced Angelica wears a straw bonnet and a homespun dress, but she's a stalwart savior who comes tramping out of the mist on huge bare feet to lift a wagon train from Dejection Swamp. She is bent over in many of the pictures as if too tall to fit in the elegant oval frames. Pair this picture book with Lester and Pinkney's John Henry for a gigantic tall-tale celebration.

Horn Book (Fri Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 1994)

An original creation in the tall-tale tradition, Isaacs' rip-roaring narrative tells of a pioneer woman's transformation into Swamp Angel, summarizes her developing abilities, and focuses on her greatest triumph: the defeat of a marauding bear. Zelinsky, working on cherry and maple veneers, has adapted elements of American folk art; his sense of line matches the exuberance of the text so that the effect is a seamless interpretation.

Kirkus Reviews

This Tennessee tall tale concerns Angelina Longrider, who even as a child was a real big gal; in fact, and without being too gender-specific, she strongly resembles another wonderkid by the name of Paul Bunyan—and she's just as much fun. Angelina—a late bloomer—builds her first log cabin when she's two, rescues a wagon train from Dejection Swamp (hence Swamp Angel), even tangles with wily Thundering Tarnation, a bear bent on pillaging the winter stores of all Angelina's neighbors. In an epic struggle, Angelina lays Thundering Tarnation low, stocks the whole state's larders from the bear's bounteous flanks, and creates Montana's Shortgrass Prairie from his pelt. It is impossible to convey the sheer pleasure, the exaggerated loopiness, of newcomer Isaacs's wonderful story. Matching the superb text stride for stride are Zelinsky's (The Wheels on the Bus, 1990) altered-state, American primitive paintings—gems that provide new pleasures, reading after reading. To say that you are entering Caldecott land doesn't begin to do this book justice. (Fiction/Picture book. 5-9)"

School Library Journal (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

K-Gr 3--Thundering Tarnation! With its good-natured, larger-than-life heroine and broad, fanciful paintings, this original Tennessee tall tale is exhilarating and side-splittingly funny. (Dec. 1994)