A well-intentioned effort that might not connect with its intended audience.
A scrappy young white girl from tiny Monroeville, Alabama, grows up to write the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird.
Hegedus tells the story of how Nelle Harper Lee became a writer, choosing illustrative moments from her life: watching her lawyer father try cases in court, learning to read by sitting on her father’s lap as he read the newspaper, observing racial relations in the town, becoming friends with Truman Capote and writing stories together, editing the college newspaper, and going to New York City, where a Christmas gift of money from friends gave her the time to finally write a novel. It’s tricky business to write about an author of a novel young readers haven’t encountered yet. Young readers may be content with the inspirational story of a protagonist who “carved out a life of her own design,” but only older readers who have read the novel can appreciate scenes related to it. It complicates matters further when quotations from the novel are folded in without context and sentences carry more weight than many young readers will be ready for: “The red soil of Monroeville, Alabama, is as rocky as the state’s past” and “Nelle shunned the ‘pink penitentiary’ of girlhood.” Still, this is clearly a labor of love, and teachers of To Kill a Mockingbird might read it aloud for the glimpses it offers into the origins of the novel.
A well-intentioned effort that might not connect with its intended audience. (author’s note) (Picture book/biography. 6-10)Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-245670-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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
Blandly laudatory.
The iconic animator introduces young readers to each “happy place” in his life.
The tally begins with his childhood home in Marceline, Missouri, and climaxes with Disneyland (carefully designed to be “the happiest place on Earth”), but the account really centers on finding his true happy place, not on a map but in drawing. In sketching out his early flubs and later rocket to the top, the fictive narrator gives Ub Iwerks and other Disney studio workers a nod (leaving his labor disputes with them unmentioned) and squeezes in quick references to his animated films, from Steamboat Willie to Winnie the Pooh (sans Fantasia and Song of the South). Eliopoulos incorporates stills from the films into his cartoon illustrations and, characteristically for this series, depicts Disney as a caricature, trademark mustache in place on outsized head even in childhood years and child sized even as an adult. Human figures default to white, with occasional people of color in crowd scenes and (ahistorically) in the animation studio. One unidentified animator builds up the role-modeling with an observation that Walt and Mickey were really the same (“Both fearless; both resourceful”). An assertion toward the end—“So when do you stop being a child? When you stop dreaming”—muddles the overall follow-your-bliss message. A timeline to the EPCOT Center’s 1982 opening offers photos of the man with select associates, rodent and otherwise. An additional series entry, I Am Marie Curie, publishes simultaneously, featuring a gowned, toddler-sized version of the groundbreaking physicist accepting her two Nobel prizes.
Blandly laudatory. (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2875-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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