Harriet Powers: an artist worth knowing.
The story of a little-known historical figure whose life was sewn together with quilts.
Harriet Powers, born a slave near Athens, Georgia, grew up surrounded by textile arts: carding, dyeing, and weaving cloth and sewing and stuffing batting into quilts. The women and girls in her family taught her these arts at an early age, and she promised one day to “sew a magic world.” After she married and had children, the Civil War came and went, leaving her large family with no livelihood. Harriet picked up her needle and began to turn nothing into something…something that she loved but sold to feed her family. Though Harriet sewed only two story quilts in her lifetime, their uniqueness and intricacy have made them museum-worthy; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston now house these works of art. Each of the 11 panels in the “Bible” quilt and the 15 in the “Pictorial” quilt contain a story from the Bible or from history. Punctuating Herkert’s narrative of Powers’ life are informative historical tidbits imposed onto small, frayed swatches of fabric. Brantley-Newton’s airy, colorful mixed-media illustrations include a wonderful array of fabrics with different designs and textures, and the skin tones of the black characters depict a realistically diverse range. Unsourced dialogue makes the book problematic as nonfiction, but as a picture-book introduction to an unsung artist, it inspires.
Harriet Powers: an artist worth knowing. (author’s notes, bibliography, quilt explanations) (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-75462-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
A succinct, edifying read, but don’t buy it for the pictures.
Abraham Lincoln’s ascent to the presidency is recounted in a fluid, easy-to-read biography for early readers.
Simple, direct sentences stress Lincoln’s humble upbringing, his honesty, and his devotion to acting with moral conviction. “Lincoln didn’t seem like a man who would be president one day. But he studied hard and became a lawyer. He cared about people and about justice.” Slavery and Lincoln’s signature achievement of emancipation are explained in broad yet defined, understandable analogies. “At that time, in the South, the law let white people own black people, just as they owned a house or a horse.” Readers are clearly given the president’s perspective through some documented memorable quotes from his own letters. “Lincoln did not like slavery. ‘If slavery is not wrong,’ he wrote to a friend ‘nothing is wrong.’ ” (The text does not clarify that this letter was written in 1865 and not before he ascended to the presidency, as implied by the book.) As the war goes on and Lincoln makes his decision to free the slaves in the “Southern states”—“a bold move”—Lincoln’s own words describe his thinking: “ ‘If my name ever goes into history,’ Lincoln said, ‘it will be for this act.’ ” A very basic timeline, which mentions the assassination unaddressed in the text, is followed by backmatter providing photographs, slightly more detailed historical information, and legacy. It’s a pity that the text is accompanied by unremarkable, rudimentary opaque paintings.
A succinct, edifying read, but don’t buy it for the pictures. (Informational early reader. 6-8)Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243256-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Stirring encouragement for all “little people” with “big dreams.” (Picture book/biography. 5-7)
“There’s nothing I can’t be,” young Maya thinks, and then shows, in this profile for newly independent readers, imported from Spain.
The inspirational message is conveyed through a fine skein of biographical details. It begins with her birth in St. Louis and the prejudice she experienced growing up in a small Arkansas town and closes with her reading of a poem “about her favorite thing: hope” at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. In between, it mentions the (unspecified) “attack” by her mother’s boyfriend and subsequent elective muteness she experienced as a child, as well as some of the varied pursuits that preceded her eventual decision to become a writer. Kaiser goes on in a closing spread to recap Angelou’s life and career, with dates, beneath a quartet of portrait photos. Salaberria’s simple illustrations, filled with brown-skinned figures, are more idealized than photorealistic, but, though only in the cover image do they make direct contact with readers’, Angelou’s huge eyes are an effective focal point in each scene. The message is similar in the co-published Amelia Earhart, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara (and also translated by Pitt), but the pictures are more fanciful as illustrator Mariadiamantes endows the aviator with a mane of incandescent orange hair and sends her flying westward (in contradiction of the text and history) on her final around-the-world flight.
Stirring encouragement for all “little people” with “big dreams.” (Picture book/biography. 5-7)Pub Date: July 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-84780-889-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
