Informative and inspirational.
A tattoo artist reflects on her personal journey and her adopted community.
Staking out a claim to be “America’s very first female African American tattoo artist,” Gresham starts off her tale by spotlighting the peace symbol she drew on her arm in black marker as a child inspired by watching Civil Rights protests on TV. She covers her later move to New Orleans, where she opened a tattoo studio and became a welcoming neighborhood presence both before and after Hurricane Katrina. Retracing her artistic development, from her rejection of an elementary school art teacher’s instruction to “stay in the lines” to her determined quests for just the right inks, colors, and designs for dark skin, she provides plenty of generally applicable advice: “Stray outside the lines.” “Follow your heart.” “Do what scares you.” “There will be storms, but never give up!” Wilkerson goes more for evocative glimpses than exact reproductions of Gresham’s work (the backmatter includes one close-up photo), offering instead views of her hunched over drawings and drawing boards, at work in her shop, arguing with an early business partner when he announces that tattooing women is “distasteful,” and, after remarking on the “vibrancy, rhythm, and style” of her community, waving from her door to customers and passersby broadly diverse of age, skin color, and body type. “This is how I make my mark,” she concludes. “How will you make yours?”
Informative and inspirational. (Picture-book memoir. 6-9)Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593618363
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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