A rich portrayal of the passage of a family’s artistic talents across generations.
“The dreams of girls turn into the lives of women.”
A little girl named Esther, who lives in the Peru of a century ago, paints a map of South America that features her favorite color, turquoise, which she uses for “the color of rivers and lakes and the blue morpho butterflies that lived in the rain forest.” When she grows up and has a daughter of her own, Isabel, Esther paints the girl’s room turquoise, inspiring her to dream of flying across the world. Isabel finds a home in the United States and becomes an artist. The urge to dream big is passed on again, this time to Monica, Isabel’s daughter and the book’s author, who grows up to write stories for children and to raise two daughters of her own. This autobiographical, multigenerational tale is proof that a loving parent can encourage a child not only to embrace art, but also to view the world as a place of limitless opportunities. The book is bilingual, with Spanish first, English second, though some Spanish words and phrases such as mantas (blankets) and linda (beautiful) are retained in the English text. With illustrations that place realistic images of characters’ faces against deeply saturated greens and purples and the titular turquoise, the book feels like a whirlwind journey through 100 years of family history. In fact, it could stand to be a little longer; as beautiful as it is, it’s over as quickly as an elusive dream. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A rich portrayal of the passage of a family’s artistic talents across generations. (author’s note, map, photo) (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-89239-435-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Children's Book Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Prospective younger visitors can do better than this bland mush.
A scan of landmarks, neighborhoods, food, and other attractions in the Big Apple.
Perfunctory efforts to give this tour at least a pretense of geographic or thematic unity only add to its higgledy-piggledy character. Arrhenius (City, 2018, etc.) opens with a full-page view of the Brooklyn Bridge soaring over an otherwise-unidentifiable cityscape opposite a jumble of eight smaller images that are, for all that one is labeled “Brooklyn Academy of Music” and another “Coney Island,” are likewise so stylized as to look generic. From there, in the same one-topic-per-spread format, it’s on to Manhattan uptown and down for “Rockefeller Center,” “Shopping,” and other random bites. The “Harlem” spread features a fire hydrant, a mailbox, and the (actually distant) Cloisters museum, for instance, and a glance into “Queens” offers glimpses of the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, a “Greek restaurant,” a “Mexican restaurant,” and “marathon runners.” The large trim size and aesthetic mimic M. Sasek’s perennial This Is New York (1960, revised edition 2003) while adding much-needed updates with both more diverse arrays of dress and skin hues for the stylized human figures as well as the addition of sites such as the Stonewall Inn, the 9/11 memorial, and the Fearless Girl statue.
Prospective younger visitors can do better than this bland mush. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0990-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Walker US/Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Brilliant as usual—but best suited for the shelves of personal libraries rather than public ones.
From the Press Here! (2011) panjandrum, a high-energy invitation to break out pens, pencils, and crayons for an instructive rumpus.
A brisk, directed tutorial in following instructions while having a barrel of fun, this workbook opens with a visual flex in the form of a flap of die-cut holes placed interestingly over a diverse set of patterns, then presents a hefty block of 140 drawing pages. These range from totally blank at the outset to busy spreads teeming with dots, circles, or other shapes in primary colors, and each comes with a prompt: to add dots or loops of specified size or in specified places; carefully color inside, or outside, the lines; connect dots of a certain color or particular relationship; turn dots into fruit, cars, fish, faces, and more; or mark everything up in some other way. Along the way motor skills get a workout too, as the interactions tend to progress from simple to less so: “Make these dots the same. / Now make them as different as can be!” Who knew there was so much one could do with red, yellow, and blue dots? Once they start, primary grade Picassos are going to find it hard to stop before the end, and as the pages aren’t erasable, do-overs aren’t in the picture.
Brilliant as usual—but best suited for the shelves of personal libraries rather than public ones. (Novelty. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4521-7860-8
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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