AMELIA TO ZORA

With spirited language and marvelous collages, an abecedarium of contemporary women takes flight. Chin-Lee doesn’t attempt, in her single page of text, to do anything but evoke the lives of her subjects, but she does that powerfully. For each woman, she tells an anecdote or illuminates a single action rather than summarize an entire life. Each page also includes a quotation from her subject. By using their given names instead of their family names, she not only personalizes her approach, but also creates an intimacy between these women and their readers. D is for Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers; G is for Grace Hopper, who helped create COBOL and popularized the term “bug” for computer errors; O is for Oprah; U is for Ursula Le Guin, writer and activist. The collages use everything from cloth, photographs, pen-and-ink drawings, found objects and dried flowers to make images that invite repeated examination. Many of these women are still alive and working; the earliest birth date is Helen Keller’s in 1880. An inspiration and a delight. (bibliography, author’s note) (Picture book/biography. 5-10)