Grand­ma Rose tells her grand­daugh­ter that she is sav­ing all her earn­ings so she can buy the dish­es she saw in the depart­ment store. They have pink and red ros­es and blue and gold trim, and look like the dish­es her grand­moth­er used for Shab­bos meals. But when the bank teller con­verts the coins in Grand­ma Rose’s jar to the $200 she has earned and she goes to pur­chase the dish­es, Grand­ma Rose is very dis­ap­point­ed. All of the dish­es are gone! She is sad, but decides to get a lot of deli­cious food with which to fill her old dish­es. Sur­prise! When she opens the doors to her house, all of her cus­tomers, friends and fam­i­ly are gath­ered there, each hold­ing a piece of the dish set to thank her for all her won­der­ful sur­pris­es! The sto­ry ends with her say­ing ​“must be mag­ic” when Mr. Cohen asks how she knew to have all that deli­cious food for them (which is, of course, being served on those new dishes.)

Cheer­ful, bright­ly col­ored illus­tra­tions with spright­ly smil­ing peo­ple are the per­fect com­ple­ment to the text. Mar­shall, who also wrote Talia and the Rude Veg­eta­bles, has writ­ten a hope­ful sto­ry brim­ming with the joys of gen­eros­i­ty and empha­siz­ing the mes­sage of tikkun olam (fix­ing the world) with­out being didac­tic. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed for ages 4 – 6.