Good-humored inspiration from heel to toe.
Georgia’s first Black senator urges readers to get up, get dressed, and find the right shoes for what they’re going to do.
Warnock offers a shoe-based view of his own experiences—donning boots each summer to help his dad haul old cars and church shoes on Sundays to hear him preach, high-tops to play basketball, and pastor and activist shoes as a grown-up. Though he became a pastor at the same Baptist church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, he notes with humility that he “never thought it was [his] job to walk in” those shoes but to find his own, and now, after his election, he wears lace-ups for his job of helping people. Fondly watching his own children clomping around in his shoes, he tells them what his father told him: “You have to put on shoes that fit your feet—shoes for the job you’re meant to do.” Often taking ground-level perspectives to focus attention on the footwear, Grooms depicts the author recognizably in uncrowded settings that usually include racially and ethnically diverse company. A final scene of the senator sitting with a group of diverse but not individualized children does skate close to blandness, but overall the art’s clean hues and smiling faces create an atmosphere more buoyant than stale for the lightly delivered message. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Good-humored inspiration from heel to toe. (Picture-book autobiography. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-52887-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses.
An NBA star pays tribute to the influence of his grandfather.
In the same vein as his Long Shot (2009), illustrated by Frank Morrison, this latest from Paul prioritizes values and character: “My granddad Papa Chilly had dreams that came true,” he writes, “so maybe if I listen and watch him, / mine will too.” So it is that the wide-eyed Black child in the simply drawn illustrations rises early to get to the playground hoops before anyone else, watches his elder working hard and respecting others, hears him cheering along with the rest of the family from the stands during games, and recalls in a prose afterword that his grandfather wasn’t one to lecture but taught by example. Paul mentions in both the text and the backmatter that Papa Chilly was the first African American to own a service station in North Carolina (his presumed dream) but not that he was killed in a robbery, which has the effect of keeping the overall tone positive and the instructional content one-dimensional. Figures in the pictures are mostly dark-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81003-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Blandly laudatory.
The iconic animator introduces young readers to each “happy place” in his life.
The tally begins with his childhood home in Marceline, Missouri, and climaxes with Disneyland (carefully designed to be “the happiest place on Earth”), but the account really centers on finding his true happy place, not on a map but in drawing. In sketching out his early flubs and later rocket to the top, the fictive narrator gives Ub Iwerks and other Disney studio workers a nod (leaving his labor disputes with them unmentioned) and squeezes in quick references to his animated films, from Steamboat Willie to Winnie the Pooh (sans Fantasia and Song of the South). Eliopoulos incorporates stills from the films into his cartoon illustrations and, characteristically for this series, depicts Disney as a caricature, trademark mustache in place on outsized head even in childhood years and child sized even as an adult. Human figures default to white, with occasional people of color in crowd scenes and (ahistorically) in the animation studio. One unidentified animator builds up the role-modeling with an observation that Walt and Mickey were really the same (“Both fearless; both resourceful”). An assertion toward the end—“So when do you stop being a child? When you stop dreaming”—muddles the overall follow-your-bliss message. A timeline to the EPCOT Center’s 1982 opening offers photos of the man with select associates, rodent and otherwise. An additional series entry, I Am Marie Curie, publishes simultaneously, featuring a gowned, toddler-sized version of the groundbreaking physicist accepting her two Nobel prizes.
Blandly laudatory. (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2875-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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