The creators of Happy to Be Nappy (1999) return with a fine companion paean to boy-ness. “I be boy. / All bliss boy. / All fine beat. All beau boy. / Beautiful. / All bad boy beast. / All boy.” Hooks’s spare text celebrates the many aspects of being a boy, from running and jumping to sitting still and dreaming, the chopped-off declarative sentences creating a jumpy flow that embodies the pent-up energy of preschoolers. Raschka’s equally spare illustrations appear on a background of terra-cotta paper, and feature brown-skinned boys pictured as heads and limbs emerging from amorphous clothing depicted as short white lines overlaid with circles and jags of colored lines. The energy and movement conveyed by these lines, complemented by irregular tight boxy squiggles that appear floating on the page, enhances the energetic rhythm of the text. The words march across the page, varying in size and placement to complete the sense of irregular bursts of energy. For the most part, the boy figures appear without relation to one another, with two major exceptions: in one spread—“All boy. Hug me close. Don’t let me down”—a boy appears wrapped in the embrace of a nurturing adult; in the next, two boys—“All boy. Big open heart. Sweet mind”—appear with elongated arms joining to create one big circle, harmoniously enclosing two of the boxy energy-squiggles. In all, a pleasing and affirmative visual and textual interpretation of what it means to be a little boy: be boy buzz, indeed. (Picture book. 3-6)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-0814-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
Unimpeachable.
A nearly wordless exploration of Aesop’s fable of symbiotic mercy that is nothing short of masterful.
A mouse, narrowly escaping an owl at dawn, skitters up what prove to be a male lion’s tail and back. Lion releases Mouse in a moment of bemused gentility and—when subsequently ensnared in a poacher’s rope trap—reaps the benefit thereof. Pinkney successfully blends anthropomorphism and realism, depicting Lion’s massive paws and Mouse’s pink inner ears along with expressions encompassing the quizzical, hapless and nearly smiling. He plays, too, with perspective, alternating foreground views of Mouse amid tall grasses with layered panoramas of the Serengeti plain and its multitudinous wildlife. Mouse, befitting her courage, is often depicted heroically large relative to Lion. Spreads in watercolor and pencil employ a palette of glowing amber, mouse-brown and blue-green. Artist-rendered display type ranges from a protracted “RRROAARRRRRRRRR” to nine petite squeaks from as many mouselings. If the five cubs in the back endpapers are a surprise, the mouse family of ten, perched on the ridge of father lion’s back, is sheer delight.
Unimpeachable. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-01356-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Mixed-race children certainly deserve mirror books, but they also deserve excellent text and illustrations. This one misses...
This tan-skinned, freckle-faced narrator extols her own virtues while describing the challenges of being of mixed race.
Protagonist Lilly appears on the cover, and her voluminous curly, twirly hair fills the image. Throughout the rhyming narrative, accompanied by cartoonish digital illustrations, Lilly brags on her dark skin (that isn’t very), “frizzy, wild” hair, eyebrows, intellect, and more. Her five friends present black, Asian, white (one blonde, one redheaded), and brown (this last uses a wheelchair). This array smacks of tokenism, since the protagonist focuses only on self-promotion, leaving no room for the friends’ character development. Lilly describes how hurtful racial microaggressions can be by recalling questions others ask her like “What are you?” She remains resilient and says that even though her skin and hair make her different, “the way that I look / Is not all I’m about.” But she spends so much time talking about her appearance that this may be hard for readers to believe. The rhyming verse that conveys her self-celebration is often clumsy and forced, resulting in a poorly written, plotless story for which the internal illustrations fall far short of the quality of the cover image.
Mixed-race children certainly deserve mirror books, but they also deserve excellent text and illustrations. This one misses the mark on both counts. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63233-170-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Eifrig
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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