GLORIOUS ANGELS

A disappointing followup to the sensational Brown Angels (1993). Myers dips into a trove of old portraits again, this time offering a multiethnic, multicultural selection: children from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas; dressed in robes, loincloths, bulky cloth coats, and swaddling clothes; in studios and outside; some alone, some in family groups; some smiling, others apprehensive—all enthralling. The trappings are less so: full-page sepia-toned (with occasional touches of hand coloring) photos across from interchangeable verses of a rapturous hymn ("Celebrate these rosy lips/that curl in patient smiles/So wide I am encircled,/lost . . ./sweetly enrapt in love") printed over very pale green antique wallpaper patterns. Readers are left to guess what country, or even what continent, the children were in, and Myers contributes neither personal responses to individual pictures nor real or imagined stories to give them context. "Let us celebrate the children," he writes, an adult addressing other adults in the body of the text as well as the introduction; for young people, a glimpse of past generations is their explicit gain, with the text and design mere distractions. A gilt lily. (Picture book. 4-10)