A tribute to a community treasure, understated but rich in feeling.
After crop failures force a family to relocate to town, a country boy is delighted to discover a whole library there for him and other members of the Black community.
The move to Roxboro, North Carolina—inspired by the author’s own experiences growing up in the 1950s—brings changes welcome and otherwise to young Junior’s life, but a wonderful one comes from a schoolmate’s revelation: “We have our own library.” A small building in a nearby clearing contains a dazzling world of books, and Junior runs home with a book about George Washington Carver for his father, a book of poetry by Phillis Wheatley for his mother, and “one on the three musketeers” for himself. Choosing a muted palette, Christie reflects the quiet dignity of Ramsey’s sparely worded narrative in views of slender, dark-skinned figures, usually seen from a distance, moving between small, widely spaced houses in verdant settings. He closes with a tender scene of Junior sitting on the porch reading to his father, who never learned how. (Momma explains that he worked the farm as a child so that his younger siblings could go to school.) The author adds a news clipping to his afterword with a photo of the log cabin library that led him to write this semi-autobiographical tale; reflecting on his own arrival in Roxboro in 1959, he writes of that library’s importance at “a time when the hopes and dreams of little Black children were easily dashed.”
A tribute to a community treasure, understated but rich in feeling. (Picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781541599123
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Carolrhoda
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales.
The Mouse and the Motorcycle (1965) upgrades to The Mice and the Rolls-Royce.
In Windsor Castle there sits a “dollhouse like no other,” replete with working plumbing, electricity, and even a full library of real, tiny books. Called Queen Mary’s Dollhouse, it also plays host to the Whiskers family, a clan of mice that has maintained the house for generations. Henry Whiskers and his cousin Jeremy get up to the usual high jinks young mice get up to, but when Henry’s little sister Isabel goes missing at the same time that the humans decide to clean the house up, the usually bookish big brother goes on the adventure of his life. Now Henry is driving cars, avoiding cats, escaping rats, and all before the upcoming mouse Masquerade. Like an extended version of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904), Priebe keeps this short chapter book constantly moving, with Duncan’s peppy art a cute capper. Oddly, the dollhouse itself plays only the smallest of roles in this story, and no factual information on the real Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is included at the tale’s end (an opportunity lost).
Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales. (Fantasy. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6575-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Rappaport makes this long struggle palpable and relevant, while Faulkner adds a winning mix of gravitas and high spirits.
Rappaport examines the salient successes and raw setbacks along the 144-year-long road between the nation’s birth and women’s suffrage.
This lively yet forthright narrative pivots on a reality that should startle modern kids: women’s right to vote was only achieved in 1920, 72 years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Indeed, time’s passage figures as a textual motif, connecting across decades such determined women as Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone. They spoke tirelessly, marched, organized, and got arrested. Rappaport includes events such as 1913’s Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C., but doesn’t shy from divisive periods like the Civil War. Faulkner’s meticulously researched gouache-and-ink illustrations often infuse scenes with humor by playing with size and perspective. As Stanton and Lucretia Mott sail into London in 1840 for the World Anti-Slavery Conference, Faulkner depicts the two women as giants on the ship’s upper deck. On the opposite page, as they learn they’ll be barred as delegates, they’re painted in miniature, dwarfed yet unflappable beneath a gallery full of disapproving men. A final double-page spread mingles such modern stars as Shirley Chisholm and Sonia Sotomayor amid the historical leaders.
Rappaport makes this long struggle palpable and relevant, while Faulkner adds a winning mix of gravitas and high spirits. (biographical thumbnails, chronology, sources, websites, further reading, author’s note) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7868-5142-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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