A timely book about the importance of persevering in the struggle for equality.
A girl recounts the struggles she and her friends went through to be admitted to an all-white school in Rigaud and Penn’s nonfiction picture book.
Narrated in the voice of Black student marcher Joyce Clemons, the story opens with Joyce explaining that she and her fellow students had to walk 600 miles to be treated fairly at school. When Joyce was young in the 1950s, even though segregation was against the law, the Hillsboro School Board wouldn’t let Black students attend Webster Elementary, an all-white school, even after a fire had damaged a Hillsboro school Black students attended. Together, Black mothers and students marched to Webster every day, only to be turned away at the door. But they kept going: “We stepped over the box lines on the calendar, across the rows of dates, and down the page, until it flipped and we started at the top again.” They marched for 300 days—two school years—before a judge ruled in their favor. Rigaud and Penn navigate themes of injustice and prejudice from a child’s eye view, making it easy to see that the system wrongly kept Joyce and her friends out. Lilly’s painterly digital illustrations integrate photographs and news clippings, firmly grounding the story in historical evidence. The book includes portraits of the 19 mothers who marched, and endnotes offer a timeline and further historical details.
A timely book about the importance of persevering in the struggle for equality.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780999661383
Page Count: 46
Publisher: Daydreamers Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet and endearing feathered migration.
A relationship between a Latina grandmother and her mixed-race granddaughter serves as the frame to depict the ruby-throated hummingbird migration pattern.
In Granny’s lap, a girl is encouraged to “keep still” as the intergenerational pair awaits the ruby-throated hummingbirds with bowls of water in their hands. But like the granddaughter, the tz’unun—“the word for hummingbird in several [Latin American] languages”—must soon fly north. Over the next several double-page spreads, readers follow the ruby-throated hummingbird’s migration pattern from Central America and Mexico through the United States all the way to Canada. Davies metaphorically reunites the granddaughter and grandmother when “a visitor from Granny’s garden” crosses paths with the girl in New York City. Ray provides delicately hashed lines in the illustrations that bring the hummingbirds’ erratic flight pattern to life as they travel north. The watercolor palette is injected with vibrancy by the addition of gold ink, mirroring the hummingbirds’ flashing feathers in the slants of light. The story is supplemented by notes on different pages with facts about the birds such as their nest size, diet, and flight schedule. In addition, a note about ruby-throated hummingbirds supplies readers with detailed information on how ornithologists study and keep track of these birds.
A sweet and endearing feathered migration. (bibliography, index) (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0538-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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