Bags up a worthy takeaway about finding beauty in the most unlikely of places.
A tribute to a New York City sanitation worker who salvaged a museum’s worth of treasures from the trash.
Though actual glimpses of the thousands of antique toys, old family portraits, and other evocative artifacts that Nelson Molina gathered over the course of his long career are limited to a paltry few photos at the end, his message that our castoff junk is rich in things that can be usefully recycled or upcycled comes through strongly in this brief biographical account. Following an appeal from Molina himself to search for the beauty and value in everything, even garbage, Larsen looks back to his subject’s youth in East Harlem. The author links the pleasure that Molina took in building birdhouses from discarded bits of lumber and repairing a broken toy truck for his little brother to later years on the job—arranging reclaimed items first in a locker room and then expanding into larger quarters as the first few finds grew into thousands. Vidal’s tidy, pleasant scenes of Molina hauling trash and sifting through garbage are implausibly clean and uncrowded. Still, suggestions for personal ways to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rethink” at the end invite readers to carry on the good work. Molina writes that his parents were from Puerto Rico; figures in group scenes are racially diverse.
Bags up a worthy takeaway about finding beauty in the most unlikely of places. (Picture-book biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781728283517
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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
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