A striking, quirky ode to a unique vision.
This picture-book biography, beginning in Flannery O’Connor’s childhood and ending with her untimely death, shines a light on her love of strangeness.
With its memorable opening line, “Right from the start young Flannery took a shine to chickens,” the book celebrates her fascination with life’s peculiarities—and death: “How strange to find something large and beautiful rushing in with all that sadness,” the text remarks about her grief at her father’s passing. Deciding that she wants to write stories “as strange as death,” she chooses staring as a writer’s tool, plumbing the “hidden strangeness” of people and looking for “flashes of good” in complicated characters. After college and a brief stint writing in New York, she is diagnosed with lupus and returns home to Georgia. Alznauer includes some appropriately grim humor, as in young Flannery’s fondness for a photo of a rooster that lived for a month without its head, and classroom humor as well: Flannery flings elastic from her braces at an impatient Sister Consolata. The exaggerated scale and off-kilter perspectives of Zhu’s illustrations align with the book’s focus on eccentricity, adding some imagined characters of color to the mostly white cast of historical figures. The thoughtful design—at 12 inches square, as outsized as its subject—includes a type chosen because its designer, like O’Connor, had a love for drawing birds. Backmatter fleshes out O’Connor’s life and personality and includes a bibliography; it’s not clear if the book’s dialogue is directly quoted or invented.
A striking, quirky ode to a unique vision. (Picture book/biography. 5-18)Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59270-2954
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An authentic and moving time capsule of middle school angst, trauma, and joy.
Through the author’s own childhood diary entries, a seventh grader details her inner life before and after 9/11.
Alyssa’s diary entries start in September 2000, in the first week of her seventh grade year. She’s 11 and dealing with typical preteen concerns—popularity and anxiety about grades—along with other things more particular to her own life. She’s shuffling between Queens and Manhattan to share time between her divorced parents and struggling with thick facial hair and classmates who make her feel like she’s “not a whole person” due to her mixed White and Puerto Rican heritage. Alyssa is endlessly earnest and awkward as she works up the courage to talk to her crush, Alejandro; gushes about her dreams of becoming a shoe designer; and tries to solve her burgeoning unibrow problem. The diaries also have a darker side, as a sense of impending doom builds as the entries approach 9/11, especially because Alyssa’s father works in finance in the World Trade Center. As a number of the diary entries are taken directly from the author’s originals, they effortlessly capture the loud, confusing feelings middle school brings out. The artwork, in its muted but effective periwinkle tones, lends a satisfying layer to the diary’s accessible and delightful format.
An authentic and moving time capsule of middle school angst, trauma, and joy. (author's note) (Graphic memoir. 8-13)Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-77427-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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