Beautiful but deeply flawed.
A book of Arabic folktales and fables with minimalist illustrations, translated from the German.
Meiners attempts to provide readers with a story for each part of the Middle East—or, as she describes the region in her foreword, “Arabia.” Varying in length, each story offers a moral or a lesson as a window into the native cultures of its characters. Although some plotlines are familiar, others are unique, such as the Palestinian story “A Little Camel,” which takes readers into the underground world of the “Djinns,” or “The Old Pair of Shoes,” a story about a man who desperately tries to rid himself of his unlucky shoes. Visually it shines. Meiners’ style is minimalist and distinctive, using only cyan and magenta, sometimes overlaid to make brown, to create captivating illustrations. Culturally, however, it does not. While Meiners does offer some context to the stories and the region from which these tales are borrowed, her framing of the book around “Arabia”—a “magical world” and “distant lands”—falls into orientalist tropes of the Middle East that exoticize, simplify, and distort elements of the region’s cultures. On a more granular level, the book has gaps and errors. Despite the inclusion of a Palestinian story, Palestine does not appear on the appended map, and although Iran is on the map, there is no Iranian story; most Iraqis do not speak Persian, as a note asserts; and “djinn” is a plural noun already.
Beautiful but deeply flawed. (glossary, activities) (Folktales. 7-12)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7358-4323-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: NorthSouth
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Though usually cast as the trickster, Coyote is more victim than victimizer, making this a nice complement to other Coyote...
Two republished tales by a Greco-Cherokee author feature both folkloric and modern elements as well as new illustrations.
One of the two has never been offered south of the (Canadian) border. In “Coyote Sings to the Moon,” the doo-wop hymn sung nightly by Old Woman and all the animals except tone-deaf Coyote isn’t enough to keep Moon from hiding out at the bottom of the lake—until she is finally driven forth by Coyote’s awful wailing. She has been trying to return to the lake ever since, but that piercing howl keeps her in the sky. In “Coyote’s New Suit” he is schooled in trickery by Raven, who convinces him to steal the pelts of all the other animals while they’re bathing, sends the bare animals to take clothes from the humans’ clothesline, and then sets the stage for a ruckus by suggesting that Coyote could make space in his overcrowded closet by having a yard sale. No violence ensues, but from then to now humans and animals have not spoken to one another. In Eggenschwiler’s monochrome scenes Coyote and the rest stand on hind legs and (when stripped bare) sport human limbs. Old Woman might be Native American; the only other completely human figure is a pale-skinned girl.
Though usually cast as the trickster, Coyote is more victim than victimizer, making this a nice complement to other Coyote tales. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55498-833-4
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Chicken sexer? Breath odor evaluator? Cryptozoologist? Island caretaker? The choices dazzle! (Informational picture book....
From funeral clown to cheese sculptor, a tally of atypical trades.
This free-wheeling survey, framed as a visit to “The Great Hall of Jobs,” is designed to shake readers loose from simplistic notions of the world of work. Labarre opens with a generic sculpture gallery of, as she puts it, “The Classics”—doctor, dancer, farmer, athlete, chef, and the like—but quickly moves on, arranging busy cartoon figures by the dozen in kaleidoscopic arrays, with pithy captions describing each occupation. As changes of pace she also tucks in occasional challenges to match select workers (Las Vegas wedding minister, “ethical” hacker, motion-capture actor) with their distinctive tools or outfits. The actual chances of becoming, say, the queen’s warden of the swans or a professional mattress jumper, not to mention the nitty-gritty of physical or academic qualifications, income levels, and career paths, are left largely unspecified…but along with noting that new jobs are being invented all the time (as, in the illustration, museum workers wheel in a “vlogger” statue), the author closes with the perennial insight that it’s essential to love what you do and the millennial one that there’s nothing wrong with repeatedly switching horses midstream. The many adult figures and the gaggle of children (one in a wheelchair) visiting the “Hall” are diverse of feature, sex, and skin color.
Chicken sexer? Breath odor evaluator? Cryptozoologist? Island caretaker? The choices dazzle! (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1219-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Nosy Crow
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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