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BRUSHING MOM’S HAIR

Name: BRUSHING MOM’S HAIR
Author: Andrea Cheng
ISBN: 978-1-59078-599-7

by Andrea Cheng and illustrated by Nicole Wong ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2009

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Based on Cheng’s experience, this candid story sensitively explores a teenager’s emotions as she copes with her mother’s illness and recovery during treatments for breast cancer. Writing in free verse, Ann is just shy of 15 when her mother is diagnosed. Backed by a loving and supportive family, Ann goes about her daily life, yet everything is permeated by the thought of her mother’s illness. She has difficulty talking about it to friends: “I don’t say, / My mom / had both her breasts cut off / and now she has stitches / covered by bandages / where they were.” Instead, Ann copes by immersing herself in ballet. The author never shies from sharing the gritty details, from cleaning the tubes with bulbs attached “like turkey basters” where her breasts use to be, to hair loss, fainting and chemo treatments, all the while realistically conveying Ann’s fears and uncertainty. Wong’s delicate black-and-white sketches that grace each poem make Ann look somewhat younger than 15. As a result, this slim volume is likely to appeal to a correspondingly younger audience. Worthy and moving. (Fiction. 10-13)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-59078-599-7

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Wordsong/Boyds Mills

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009

Categories:

CHILDREN'S POETRY

- BOOK REVIEW
BEES IN THE CITY
by Andrea Cheng ; illustrated by Sarah McMenemy

- BOOK REVIEW
THE YEAR OF THE GARDEN
by Andrea Cheng ; illustrated by Patrice Barton

- BOOK REVIEW
THE YEAR OF THE THREE SISTERS
by Andrea Cheng ; illustrated by Patrice Barton

THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF AMERICAN CHILDREN'S POEMS

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THE OXFORD ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF AMERICAN CHILDREN'S POEMS

by Donald Hall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 1999

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Hall (The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America, 1985, etc.), offers up a chestnut-flavored alternative for younger readers, matching roughly contemporary illustrations to one or two selections from each of 57 American poets. To the usual suspects—Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody, who are you?” and even Carl Sandburg’s “Fog”—he adds more recent works from the likes of Jack Prelutsky, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, and Janet S. Wong; he also includes three poems attributed somewhat baldly to an “Anonymous Native American.” The art comprises a gallery of American illustration, from crude 18th-century woodcuts, through Jessie Willcox Smith, to Marcia Brown and the Dillons. Writing that “poetry is most poetry when it makes noise,” Hall recommends these verses for reading aloud and memorization, exhorting parents and children to appreciate how they “preserve a moment of the American past.” A safe collection, seldom veering from the canon. (index) (Poetry. 9-11)

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1999

ISBN: 0-19-512373-5

Page Count: 93

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999

Categories:

CHILDREN'S POETRY

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MILKMAN'S BOY
by Donald Hall & illustrated by Greg Shed

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD HOME DAY
by Donald Hall & illustrated by Emily Arnold McCully

- BOOK REVIEW
WHEN WILLARD MET BABE RUTH
by Donald Hall & illustrated by Barry Moser

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POETRY COMICS

From the Poetry Comics series

by Grant Snider ; illustrated by Grant Snider ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2024

Personal but personable, too, with glints of quiet humor.

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In a wryly introspective vein, a cartoonist offers a four-season round of illustrated observations on topics as varied as clouds, school, and the search for a perfect pumpkin.

“I want to put down / on paper the feeling / of fresh possibilities,” Snider writes in his “Spring” section. With reflections on the tricky art of writing poems serving as a thematic refrain, he goes on in a seasonal cycle to explorations of nature (“How do the birds / decide where / to alight?”), indoor activities (“In wool socks on thick carpet / I am MR. ELECTRIC”), and common experiences, from loading up a gigantic backpack with new books for the first day of school to waiting…and waiting…and waiting for a bus in the rain. He also invites readers to consider broad ideas, such as the rewards of practicing and the notion that failure can lead to the realization that “I’m still a work in progress.” Snider writes mostly in free verse but does break into rhyme now and then for the odd sonic grace note. Though he identifies only one entry as an actual haiku, his tersely expressed thoughts evoke that form throughout. His art is commensurately spare, with depictions of slender, dot-eyed, olive-skinned figures, generally solitary and of indeterminate age, posing balletically in, mostly, squared-off sequential panels making up mini-narratives of one to three pages.

Personal but personable, too, with glints of quiet humor. (Graphic poetry. 10-13)