An inspiring, beautifully rendered book about an artistic dream that came true.
A graphic biography that paints a captivating portrait of a Japanese American artist’s road to success against the odds.
The book opens with scenes of a teenage Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) working alongside her family—her Japanese immigrant parents and several brothers and sisters—on their California farm, where she daydreams of becoming an artist. But her reverie is abruptly cut short by news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Asawa’s father was arrested by the FBI, while her mother and six of the seven Asawa siblings (one was living in Japan) ended up in an incarceration camp in Arkansas. A supportive white teacher helped Asawa get into a teachers’ college in Milwaukee, but when she was denied the chance to graduate because of her ethnicity, Asawa pursued her first love, art, transferring to the experimental Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina. There, she became embedded in a world of contemporary artists who were pushing boundaries, launching her own career as a celebrated sculptor. Nakahira’s lively black-and-white illustrations blend ink drawing with digital coloring. They convey her characters’ emotions as well as the wire sculptures for which Asawa is known. The spare text, which combines invented dialogue with reflections from Asawa’s first-person perspective, highlights with subtlety and touches of humor the obstacles women and Japanese Americans faced in mid-20th-century America.
An inspiring, beautifully rendered book about an artistic dream that came true. (biography of Asawa, suggested reading, photos, image credits) (Graphic biography. 13-18)Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781947440098
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Getty Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Small but mighty necessary reading.
A miniature manifesto for radical queer acceptance that weaves together the personal and political.
Eli, a cis gay white Jewish man, uses his own identities and experiences to frame and acknowledge his perspective. In the prologue, Eli compares the global Jewish community to the global queer community, noting, “We don’t always get it right, but the importance of showing up for other Jews has been carved into the DNA of what it means to be Jewish. It is my dream that queer people develop the same ideology—what I like to call a Global Queer Conscience.” He details his own isolating experiences as a queer adolescent in an Orthodox Jewish community and reflects on how he and so many others would have benefitted from a robust and supportive queer community. The rest of the book outlines 10 principles based on the belief that an expectation of mutual care and concern across various other dimensions of identity can be integrated into queer community values. Eli’s prose is clear, straightforward, and powerful. While he makes some choices that may be divisive—for example, using the initialism LGBTQIAA+ which includes “ally”—he always makes clear those are his personal choices and that the language is ever evolving.
Small but mighty necessary reading. (resources) (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09368-9
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
A visceral window into a survivor’s childhood and a testament to the enduring influence of unconditional love.
As palliative for his beloved Abuela's worsening dementia, memoirist Ogle offers her a book of childhood recollections.
Cast in episodic rushes of free verse and paralleling events chronicled in Free Lunch (2019) and Punching Bag (2021), the poems take the author from age 4 until college in a mix of love notes to his devoted, hardworking, Mexican grandmother; gnawing memories of fights and racial and homophobic taunts at school as he gradually becomes aware of his sexuality; and bitter clashes with both his mother, described as a harsh, self-centered deadbeat with seemingly not one ounce of love to give or any other redeeming feature, and the distant White father who threw him out the instant he came out. Though overall the poems are less about the author’s grandmother than about his own angst and issues (with searing blasts of enmity reserved for his birthparents), a picture of a loving intergenerational relationship emerges, offering moments of shared times and supportive exchanges amid the raw tallies of beat downs at home, sudden moves to escape creditors, and screaming quarrels. “My memories of a wonderful woman are written in words and verses and fragments in this book,” he writes in a foreword, “unable to be unwritten. And if it is forgotten, it can always be read again.”
A visceral window into a survivor’s childhood and a testament to the enduring influence of unconditional love. (Verse memoir. 13-18)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-01995-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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