Heartbreaking yet warmly tinged with hope.
An Armenian grandfather reflects on his past.
Cooking with his mama, a young boy has no reason to believe anything is out of the ordinary. But people are leaving town, and Mama tells the child and his sisters that they must go, too. She and their father will follow soon. The boy has much he wants to express, but he has lost the words. He endures a long, weary march through the desert and makes it to safety but doesn’t reunite with his parents. The boy grows older and has children and grandchildren. The pain recedes, but the words don’t return—until his grandson, on a day so like the first, asks where they are from. Stories of the Armenian genocide are rarely committed to paper, but nearly every diasporic Armenian family has them, keeping them as close as the ubiquitous sepia-toned photos of relatives whose lives were lost but whose names remain. Though inspired by the experiences of the author’s husband’s grandfather, this is also the story of the countless children forced to leave their homes for reasons they couldn’t articulate and of their children and grandchildren, who will always strive to know where they come from. The warm, soft illustrations add a dreamlike quality to the spare words, moving in their simplicity. The tale might seem detached on the surface, but it can hardly be anything else, when the words to tell it fully have been lost.
Heartbreaking yet warmly tinged with hope. (author’s and illustrator’s notes, history of the Armenian genocide, facts about Armenia, glossary, selected bibliography) (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781797213651
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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