'Going To' New Awleens : Whitney Stewart gives kids a primer on our good life
By Matt Berman
From New Orleans Times-Picayune April 15, 2001

New Orleans writer Whitney Stewart is known for her biographies for children of world leaders such as the Dalai Llama, Deng Xiaoping, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Aung San Suu Kyi, many of whom she has interviewed. To write these books she has traveled the world, visiting places such as Tibet, Burma and Nepal. So it is appropriate that her first foray into children's fiction should be an entry in the "Going To'' series of novels for children, each of which is also an introduction to a city, and contains a kids' travel guide at the back, written in the voice of the main character in the novel. And it's only natural that it is set in the city she knows best -- New Orleans.

Jammin' on the Avenue: Going to New Orleans by Whitney Stewart (Four Corners Publishing Company, $5.00) will appeal to kids anywhere, but especially Orleanians, who will recognize the places (and even some of the people).

Teen guitarist Eric Weiman travels alone from his home in Massachusetts to compete in the Quickfinger Guitar Contest at Tipitina's. Since Eric's family is too poor to be able to buy him a good guitar, he has high hopes of winning the contest, for which the prize is a new Fender Stratocaster guitar, and free summer music camp in San Francisco. He stays with a Korean-American host family, and soon meets two other competitors: wealthy local girl Lashley Moran, and Jordan Brooks, an angry boy who will stop at nothing to win.

Eric is soon good friends with Lashley and his hosts' son Ben, and visits their school, Country Day, with them. He also is introduced to New Orleans food, streetcars, the Quarter and Garden District, and some local notables such as Coleen Salley (the storyteller who appeared in Maple Street Book Shop's Visa ad), and musicians Richard Harrison, John Rankin and Perrin Isaac, the emcee for the contest.

At the rehearsals for the contest, Eric is sure that Jordan is trying to trip him up. And when his guitar is damaged, Eric suspects sabotage.

Once the contest gets going, readers are pulled in by the suspense and excitement. But even before that, the book offers two other pleasures. The first is the New Orleans ambiance, which pervades the book from the opening chapter. For New Orleanians this offers the comfort of familiarity combined with the chance to see the city we love with fresh eyes. Stewart captures the flavor of different neighborhoods, the smells and tastes, even the weather: ". . . weather is in your face all the time there. You get humidity. You get purple-gray clouds and heavy rains. You get strange, flat orange light or bright, white sun, and you get puffs of vibrating air that make you stop whatever you're doing and pay attention to nature's messages."

The second delight is the musical ambiance. Stewart, whose husband and son are both musicians (and whose son makes a sly appearance near the end), gets the grace notes right. Whether reading about Louis Armstrong, listening to and watching other musicians, or playing himself, Eric lives in a musician's world, and Stewart effectively conveys the joy and obsession that entails.