When Benjamin Franklin was young, he wanted nothing so much as to run away to the sea. “All Benjamin desired was to be a sailor,” Michael Rosen writes in “A Ben of All Trades” (Candlewick, 30 pages, $16.99), a picture-book account of the great man’s Boston boyhood. To the exasperation of Ben’s father, though, “all he appeared to be was an aimless woolgatherer.” In this genial and atmospheric account, the boy’s lack of direction will give readers ages 5-12 a glimpse of a very different world from their own. As Mr. Rosen tells...

Source: Wall Street Journal March 13, 2020 15:11 UTC