[In Tongue of Flame: The Life of Lydia Maria Child, Milton Meltzer] has provided teenagers with an outstanding biography of a little-known nineteenth-century woman writer, founder and editor of the first children's magazine, Juvenile Miscellany, and a fiery and tireless crusader for the abolition of slavery. In describing her activities as friend, co-worker, and advisor to many of the outstanding social reform figures of the time, Mr. Meltzer gives his readers a history of the period and the turbulent movements in which Maria Child took part. Read in the context of today's civil rights movement, this is a timely and exciting biography.

Sophia B. Mehrer, in her review of "Tongue of Flame: The Life of Lydia Maria Child," in School Library Journal, an appendix to Library Journal (reprinted from the May, 1965 issue of School Library Journal, published by R. R. Bowker Co./A Xerox Corporation; copyright © 1965), Vol. 11, No. 9, May, 1965, p. 117.