Watch a Disney film instead.
A girl grows up to be an instrumental Disney artist.
Mary Blair, nee Mary Browne Robinson, enjoys colors and painting in childhood. She dreams of being an artist and earns a spot at an art school. Later, she accepts a job at Walt Disney Studios. Over the course of her career, she paints Dumbo, creates concept art for iconic animated films (Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan), and helps create and design the world-famous Disney park attraction “It’s a small world.” Novesky’s plotline and prose about Blair’s massively influential achievements are oddly lackluster, reporting facts without spirit. Likewise, Lee’s cut-paper and gouache media have a flatness—neither cut paper nor gouache is recognizable on most spreads—and a lack of vitality. Blair’s a generic, tiny-waisted blonde white lady; characters smile almost unceasingly, even when the subject is poverty. This art is styled similarly to Disney art, but it lacks pizzazz. “It’s a small world” is glorified, with no examination of how it stereotypes and exoticizes race, nationality, and ethnicity; Lee’s illustrations reinscribe that very problem while Novesky romantically calls “small world” a celebration of “unity, goodwill, and global peace” leading to “colorful happily ever afters” (for whom?). Amy Guglielmo, Jacqueline Tourville, and Brigette Barrager’s Pocket Full of Colors (2017) is a far livelier Blair biography, although it also ignores racism concerns.
Watch a Disney film instead. (illustrator’s note, note from Mary Blair’s niece, further reading) (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4847-5720-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Disney Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses.
An NBA star pays tribute to the influence of his grandfather.
In the same vein as his Long Shot (2009), illustrated by Frank Morrison, this latest from Paul prioritizes values and character: “My granddad Papa Chilly had dreams that came true,” he writes, “so maybe if I listen and watch him, / mine will too.” So it is that the wide-eyed Black child in the simply drawn illustrations rises early to get to the playground hoops before anyone else, watches his elder working hard and respecting others, hears him cheering along with the rest of the family from the stands during games, and recalls in a prose afterword that his grandfather wasn’t one to lecture but taught by example. Paul mentions in both the text and the backmatter that Papa Chilly was the first African American to own a service station in North Carolina (his presumed dream) but not that he was killed in a robbery, which has the effect of keeping the overall tone positive and the instructional content one-dimensional. Figures in the pictures are mostly dark-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81003-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A picture book more than worthy of sharing the shelf with Alan Schroeder and Jerry Pinkney’s Minty (1996) and Carole Boston...
A memorable, lyrical reverse-chronological walk through the life of an American icon.
In free verse, Cline-Ransome narrates the life of Harriet Tubman, starting and ending with a train ride Tubman takes as an old woman. “But before wrinkles formed / and her eyes failed,” Tubman could walk tirelessly under a starlit sky. Cline-Ransome then describes the array of roles Tubman played throughout her life, including suffragist, abolitionist, Union spy, and conductor on the Underground Railroad. By framing the story around a literal train ride, the Ransomes juxtapose the privilege of traveling by rail against Harriet’s earlier modes of travel, when she repeatedly ran for her life. Racism still abounds, however, for she rides in a segregated train. While the text introduces readers to the details of Tubman’s life, Ransome’s use of watercolor—such a striking departure from his oil illustrations in many of his other picture books—reveals Tubman’s humanity, determination, drive, and hope. Ransome’s lavishly detailed and expansive double-page spreads situate young readers in each time and place as the text takes them further into the past.
A picture book more than worthy of sharing the shelf with Alan Schroeder and Jerry Pinkney’s Minty (1996) and Carole Boston Weatherford and Kadir Nelson’s Moses (2006). (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2047-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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