After Mary’s family immigrates to America to escape the potato famine, they live in an Irish neighborhood in NYC. Mary wants very much to ride in the St. Patrick’s Day parade and searches diligently for a four leaf clover 🍀. She tangles with a Leprechaun and loses but guess who saves the day?

4/5 lucky clovers. ( )

[GoodReads]
More than anything Mary wants to ride in the horse-drawn cart with Mr. Finnegan on her first St. Patrick's Day in America. A touching story of a young immigrant girl whose one and only wish really does come true. "Expressive, full-color paintings will draw children right into the story".--Booklist.
[Amazon]
A St. Patrick's Day picture book that blends realism and folklore. Kroll accurately portrays the difficult life of the Irish immigrants who lived in lower Manhattan in the 1850s and spices this reality with a little Irish magic in the form of a visiting leprechaun.

Forced to leave their home in Donegal when the potato blight wipes out their crop year after year, the McLean family make the long and arduous journey to America in this picture-book celebration of St. Patrick's Day, eventually settling in a small basement apartment in lower Manhattan. As Mr. McLean finds work on the docks and Mrs. McLean goes out as a maid to a wealthy family on Fifth Avenue, the children of the family begin to attend school, and to become acquainted with their neighbors, who are mostly Irish immigrants like themselves. Learning of the marvelous St. Patrick's Day parade that is held every March 17th, young Mary decides that she would like to participate, asking local grocer Mr. Finnegan if she can ride in his cart with him. His response - that she must give him a shamrock if she wants to ride in his cart - sends her on a months-long quest to find a three-leafed clover somewhere in snowy New York. Will the leprechaun she meets in City Hall Park be able to help her? Or will someone else, closer to home, step in...?

Although I'm somewhat dubious when it comes to a lot of the leprechaun and shamrock-centric fare that pops up at this time of year - genuine folkloric collections such as Bairbre McCarthy's The Keeper of the Crock of Gold: Irish Leprechaun Tales being an exception, of course - I picked Steven Kroll's picture-book up from my library's St. Patrick's Day display this past weekend anyway, mostly because I wanted to see what he would do with the immigrant-family story. I enjoyed Mary McLean and the St. Patrick's Day Parade for the most part, but (predictably) I could have lived without the entire subplot involving the leprechaun. Since the heartwarming conclusion of the tale, in which Mary's father finds her a shamrock, would have worked just as well if Mary had simply scoured the streets and parks of New York for the shamrock, without ever encountering the leprechaun, the inclusion of more fantastic elements felt like a distraction from the real story about the McLean family, and how they began to settle in to their new home. Others will perhaps feel differently, but all in all I think Janet Nolan's excellent picture-book, The St. Patrick's Day Shillelagh, is a better exploration of the Irish-American experience at this time of year. ( )

Mary and her family move from Ireland to New York. She decides she wants to ride with the store owner in the St. Patrick's Day Parade which is a huge deal in their neighborhood. He tells her if she finds a 4 leaf clover she can ride with him, she meets a leprechaun who promises to bring her one but lies. She is so upset she can't ride when her father comes home with a surprise for her. This is a good book to use when talking about immigration or different cultures. ( )

This is a fictional story with oil painting illustrations. The content of this book is about a young girl whose family just moved to American from Ireland. She desparately wants to ride in the St. Patrick's Day Parade. She has to find a perfect shamrock, before she can do that. She meets a leprechaun, and finally her father helps her find the shamrock. In the end, she gets to ride in the parade and is very happy. The reading level of this book is from third to fifth grade. The curricular connections could be Irish Americans, shamrocks, leprechauns, St. Patrick's Day, and historical fiction.