ALA Booklist (Sat Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 2006)

K Gr. 3. The bridge is San Francisco's fabled Golden Gate, and Robert's father is helping to build it. Pop is a high-iron worker, what folks called a skywalker. And, in the year 1937, he is one of more than a thousand men who are engaged in constructing the impossible bridge. Robert's friend Charlie Shu's father, a painter, is also involved, but Robert secretly feels Pop's job is more important than Mr. Shu's. Then an accident forces him to rethink things. Distinguished by its lovely, understated text and Payne's lavish and affectionate mixed-media pictures, this picture book does a quietly successful job of humanizing one of the most important feats of civil engineering in American history. For more about skywalkers, recommend Deborah Hopkinson's Sky Boys (2006), about workers who built the Empire State Building.

Horn Book (Tue Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2006)

Robert learns that all the workers building the Golden Gate Bridge are important to the project--his father, a high-iron man, is just as valuable as his friend Charlie's father, a painter. This book celebrates human accomplishment and teaches a gentle moral about the value of work. Payne's dramatic paintings set the time and place.

Kirkus Reviews

Practically bursting with pride, a lad tracks his "high-iron" father through binoculars as the Golden Gate Bridge goes up in this tribute both to the bridge itself, and to the teamwork that built it. Robert's best friend Charlie Shu's dad works on the bridge too, as a painter, but Robert thinks his own father's contribution is much more important. Then a serious accident claims the lives of several workers, causing Robert to understand that the bridge really "belongs" to everyone involved in its creation. Painting with soft-focus realism, Payne effectively captures the finished bridge's magnificence, as well as the widespread public excitement that greeted its opening in 1937. The story doesn't quite hang together, and is laced with mannered symbolism and some questionable cultural history, but like Connie Ann Kirk's Sky Dancers (2004, illustrated by Christy Hale), it offers a cogent glimpse of the human story that lies behind every great building project. (afterword) (Picture book. 7-9)

School Library Journal

Gr 1-4-Robert and his friend Charlie Shu spend many an afternoon at Fort Point watching from afar as their dads work on the crews building the Golden Gate Bridge. Robert's father is a high-iron man, a skywalker, and, in his son's eyes, has a far more important and dangerous job than the painting Charlie's dad does. When Robert's mom gives the youngsters a jigsaw puzzle based on an artist's rendering of the yet-to-be completed bridge, Robert hides a piece to give his father the honor of completing the puzzle. When a scaffold falls and 10 men die, however, he realizes that the work is equally dangerous for all involved. While the two families are celebrating the completion of the bridge, he cuts the last puzzle piece, offering half to each dad. "Finish it. It's your bridge. It belongs to both of you," he says. The text is followed by an author's note recounting the Golden Gate's history. Payne's striking mixed-media illustrations bleed off the pages and offer interesting views of the "impossible bridge"-against a star-filled sky, through a binocular lens. The spread featuring delighted throngs, both boys front and center, walking across the bridge at its opening and that of the dads, index fingers meeting across the page to complete the puzzle, say more poignantly than words that people of different backgrounds can come together to accomplish the unthinkable. Deborah Hopkinson's Sky Boys: How They Built the Empire State Building (Random, 2006) features more skywalkers at their dangerous jobs.-Marianne Saccardi, formerly at Norwalk Community College, CT Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.