Uplifting with hope and ablaze with joyous colors!
Despite her era’s racial segregation and prejudice, African American artist and art teacher Alma Thomas blazed a colorful trail.
Growing up in the early 1900s, young Alma was drawn to “the sparkling colors of nature” around her family’s large Victorian house in Columbus, Georgia. As the story recounts, she spurned the domestic pursuits her sisters embraced, longing instead “to make things, / things she could hold.” So, she started creating pottery using clay from the banks of the stream behind her childhood home. Due to racial injustice, the Thomas children weren’t allowed to attend the schools, museums, or library in their town; nevertheless, their home was filled with books and learning, and creativity as well. When Alma was 15, her family moved to Washington, D.C., where she studied art in college and then taught art at a local school. The story goes on to describe Thomas’ tireless efforts to increase access to art for the Black students in her community and her many groundbreaking achievements both as an educator and as an artist, including being the first Black woman to have a solo museum exhibition in America. The text achieves a fine balance of evocative lyricism and straightforward exposition. Wise’s vibrant, eye-catching illustrations contain echoes of Thomas’ signature abstract style, with its colorful mosaiclike patterns and tessellated brush strokes. Most characters are Black; a few illustrations include diverse representation.
Uplifting with hope and ablaze with joyous colors! (author's note, illustrator's note, timeline, sources, references) (Picture-book biography. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-302189-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
Enthusiastic and direct, this paean has a lovely ring to it.
Former National Youth Poet Laureate Gorman invites girls to raise their voices and make a difference.
“Today, we finally have a say,” proclaims the first-person plural narration as three girls (one presents Black, another is brown-skinned, and the third is light-skinned) pass one another marshmallows on a stick around a campfire. In Wise’s textured, almost three-dimensional illustrations, the trio traverse fantastical, often abstract landscapes, playing, demonstrating, eating, and even flying, while confident rhymes sing their praises and celebrate collective female victories. The phrase “LIBERATION. FREEDOM. RESPECT” appears on a protest sign that bookends their journey. Simple and accessible, the rhythmic visual storytelling presents an optimistic vision of young people working toward a better world. Sometimes family members or other diverse comrades surround the girls, emphasizing that power comes from community. Gorman is careful to specify that “some of us go by she / And some of us go by they.” She affirms, too, that each person is “a different shape and size,” though the art doesn’t show much variation in body type. Characters also vary in ability. Real-life figures emerge as the girls dream of past luminaries such as author Octavia Butler and activist Marsha P. Johnson, along with present-day role models including poet and journalist Plestia Alaqad and athlete Sha’carri Richardson; silhouettes stand in for heroines as yet unknown. Imagining that “we are where change is going” is hopeful indeed.
Enthusiastic and direct, this paean has a lovely ring to it. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780593624180
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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
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