Melancholy and moving.
Swedish artist Berta Hansson grows up on a farm and finds it stifling in this fictionalized account.
In 1920s Sweden, a family farm requires a lot of work. Everyone pitches in except Mama, in bed with tuberculosis. Berta covers Mama’s sickroom wall with drawings and makes birds of clay for her; it is achingly painful that she and Mama can’t hug for fear of contagion. Berta wants to be a bird herself, to “fly off. / Away from our village— / to something else. / To a place where I could be myself”—to stop doing farmwork and housework, and to make art all the time. Even as a job—and even though she’s a girl. Viewing a reproduction of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, Berta relates to Eve, who’s “waiting for her turn to come / into existence. To be seen. To come alive.” Lundberg’s full-color, page-filling paintings make this verse novel a picture book. They are damp and moody, the colors dark and tertiary, the shapes full of shadows and stark angles. Some faces are jarringly rouged, with red noses, like Hansson’s real-life work. Cold and hot temperatures emanate from the pages. Beauty pours from close-ups of Berta’s hands, in pink-peach-gray watercolor shadings and exquisite lines. Papa insists Berta become a housewife, but at roughly age 17, this budding artist stages a coup by burning a pot of soup—and gets herself sent off to art school. An afterword by Swedish journalist Alexandra Sundqvist adds biographical details; unfortunately, the backmatter includes only two Hansson reproductions.
(This book releases first as a digital edition, with print release currently scheduled for Aug. 4, 2020.)
Melancholy and moving. (sources, references, photos) (Picture book/historical verse fiction. 7-12)Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77306-260-0
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Hugely entertaining, timely, and triumphant.
Robot Roz undertakes an unusual ocean journey to save her adopted island home in this third series entry.
When a poison tide flowing across the ocean threatens their island, Roz works with the resident creatures to ensure that they will have clean water, but the destruction of vegetation and crowding of habitats jeopardize everyone’s survival. Brown’s tale of environmental depredation and turmoil is by turns poignant, graceful, endearing, and inspiring, with his (mostly) gentle robot protagonist at its heart. Though Roz is different from the creatures she lives with or encounters—including her son, Brightbill the goose, and his new mate, Glimmerwing—she makes connections through her versatile communication abilities and her desire to understand and help others. When Roz accidentally discovers that the replacement body given to her by Dr. Molovo is waterproof, she sets out to seek help and discovers the human-engineered source of the toxic tide. Brown’s rich descriptions of undersea landscapes, entertaining conversations between Roz and wild creatures, and concise yet powerful explanations of the effect of the poison tide on the ecology of the island are superb. Simple, spare illustrations offer just enough glimpses of Roz and her surroundings to spark the imagination. The climactic confrontation pits oceangoing mammals, seabirds, fish, and even zooplankton against hardware and technology in a nicely choreographed battle. But it is Roz’s heroism and peacemaking that save the day.
Hugely entertaining, timely, and triumphant. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780316669412
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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