Strong words and pictures add up to a sweet double play.
From Satchel Paige to Norman “Turkey” Stearnes, a dozen stars who spent all or most of their careers in the Negro Leagues strut their stuff.
Smith’s verse tributes catch his subjects in action. Here’s third baseman Ray Dandridge, for example: “Hooks on the hot corner / moving like a cat, / pouncing and leaping / at the crack of the bat.” Most of the rhythms are quick and urgent, though some entries offer a change of pace, like the sonnet for Willie Wells—“So long as hands can clap and eyes can see, / Willie, the Shakespeare of shortstops, is thee”—and a series of riffs on the legendary speed of “Cool Papa” Bell, “so fast, he scored from first off a sacrifice bunt.” Echoing the visual gravity of the illustrations in Kadir Nelson’s classic We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball (2008), Brandon follows suit with on-field images of long-limbed, sometimes exaggeratedly lanky athletes in balletic poses interspersed with close-ups of chiseled figures with imposing game faces. Closing player notes underscore the greatness of each of these players; Smith acknowledges that these Negro League career statistics were finally and properly, in 2024, added to Major League records.
Strong words and pictures add up to a sweet double play. (Picture-book poetry. 6-9)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781536225358
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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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