CITY ANGEL

City Angel, an urban, updated patron saint, hovers above the city skyline, intervening to make good things happen: petting the baker’s kitchen cat, planting seeds in a vacant lot, soothing a cranky child, assisting a firefighter and a homeless man, helping the player make the basket in the corner game, and having some fun herself, cruising on a skateboard. From morning ’til night, City Angel flies through the painterly landscape, practicing “random acts of kindness” towards its racially diverse inhabitants. Collage-and-oil illustrations are the focus of this work. The curving, tilting, twisting, intersecting forms and figures create a vibrant, rhythmic view of the angel’s intervention. Illustrations aside, will the rhyming text engage a younger reader enough to comprehend the simultaneous, unrelated events connected by the whimsical acts of this urban angel? Hard to tell, but Brooker’s pictures are wonderful. (Picture book. 4-8)