A list defining the Swahili words (with pronunciations) and a bare-bones map of the country complete this compelling package.
Thirteen brief, playful poems give us a glimpse at life in rural Tanzania, including its offshore island, Zanzibar.
Spiced with Swahili words, Grimes’s verses introduce a jam-packed bus, animals, foods, the marketplace, and several mischievous children. Her impressions are the result of a year she spent in this East African country on a research grant, yet there is a universal appeal too, as when a child burns his tongue on hot peppers. Breezy pen-and-ink and watercolor sketches enliven the pages, with one beautiful watercolor painting of Mount Meru opening across the center spread. They reflect perfectly the activity and motion described in the poems, from people on safari to a “so-old man on a so-old bike” to a boy being chased by a free-roaming zoo lion. They even show the camels that were recently introduced to the Masai in Tanzania to help make their lives easier.
A list defining the Swahili words (with pronunciations) and a bare-bones map of the country complete this compelling package. (Poetry/picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: March 30, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-13157-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
This heavily earnest celebration of multi-ethnicity combines full-bleed paintings of smiling children, viewed through a golden haze dancing, playing, planting seedlings, and the like, with a hyperbolic, disconnected text—``Dark as leopard spots, light as sand,/Children buzz with laughter that kisses our land...''— printed in wavy lines. Literal-minded readers may have trouble with the author's premise, that ``Children come in all the colors of the earth and sky and sea'' (green? blue?), and most of the children here, though of diverse and mixed racial ancestry, wear shorts and T-shirts and seem to be about the same age. Hamanaka has chosen a worthy theme, but she develops it without the humor or imagination that animates her Screen of Frogs (1993). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11131-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Echoing Ashley Wolff’s 1988 approach to Stevenson’s poetic tribute to the power of imagination, Kirk begins with neatly drawn scenes of a child in a playroom, assembling large wooden blocks into, “A kirk and a mill and a palace beside, / And a harbor as well where my vessels may ride.” All of these acquire grand architectural details and toy-like inhabitants as the pages turn, until at last the narrator declares, “Now I have done with it, down let it go!” In a final twist, the young city-builder is shown running outside, into a well-kept residential neighborhood in which all the houses except his have been transformed into piles of blocks. Not much to choose between the two interpretations, but it’s a poem that every child should have an opportunity to know. (Picture book/poetry. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-689-86964-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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