Art history with a little smile.
Following up If Picasso Painted a Snowman (2017), introductions to 19 more painters and their best-known styles.
In line with the previous gallery, the Newbolds dispatch a shiny-eyed hamster docent to squire young viewers past a set of full-page or larger scenes that imitate famous, or at least representative, paintings—with prehistoric elements, mostly dinosaurs, in each. The virtual museum tour begins with a Vitruvian Microraptor à la Leonardo and ends with a finely rendered Dino Lisa (a gowned maiasaura, according to the key at the end, but looking more than a little like Jar Jar Binks). In between he dishes up Dégas-style ballet dancers, plesiosaurs surfing a version of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa, a can of Andy Warhol’s Dino Noodle Soup, Mark Rothko color fields declared to represent layers of prehistoric rocks, and more. Other artists include Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Qi Baishi, Loïs Mailou Jones, Harrison Begay, and Marguerite Zorach. The accompanying captions incline toward wordplay: “Cassius Coolidge crates a Cretaceous card game”; “BOOM! CRASH! CRUNK! Here comes a dinosaur by Edvard Munch!” Like the art, some dinos are actual ones, others fanciful. Leonardo is an outlier in this 18th- to 20th-century company (Begay alone lived into the 21st), but the lineup is at least as varied in school or style as the previous one and more diverse of sex, race, and national background than both its predecessor and many others of its ilk. Would-be Leonardos will find both an invitingly blank page to fill at the end and elementary prompts from the versatile illustrator.
Art history with a little smile. (thumbnail biographies) (Informational picture book. 5-9)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-88448-667-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Tilbury House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era.
The New Orleans school child who famously broke the color line in 1960 while surrounded by federal marshals describes the early days of her experience from a 6-year-old’s perspective.
Bridges told her tale to younger children in 2009’s Ruby Bridges Goes to School, but here the sensibility is more personal, and the sometimes-shocking historical photos have been replaced by uplifting painted scenes. “I didn’t find out what being ‘the first’ really meant until the day I arrived at this new school,” she writes. Unfrightened by the crowd of “screaming white people” that greets her at the school’s door (she thinks it’s like Mardi Gras) but surprised to find herself the only child in her classroom, and even the entire building, she gradually realizes the significance of her act as (in Smith’s illustration) she compares a small personal photo to the all-White class photos posted on a bulletin board and sees the difference. As she reflects on her new understanding, symbolic scenes first depict other dark-skinned children marching into classes in her wake to friendly greetings from lighter-skinned classmates (“School is just school,” she sensibly concludes, “and kids are just kids”) and finally an image of the bright-eyed icon posed next to a soaring bridge of reconciliation. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era. (author and illustrator notes, glossary) (Autobiographical picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-75388-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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