A realistic portrayal of a family torn apart.
Ten-year-old Maricela’s mama picks her up from school on the day everything changes. She tells Maricela and her younger brother that their “papi won’t be coming home for a while.” Readers learn through simple prose that Maricela’s undocumented father is being held in a detention center while he awaits deportation to an unnamed but “dangerous” country. Every aspect of Maricela’s young life is affected, from her now-coachless soccer practice to her after-school routine. She narrates the story with a sense of grief and honesty true to a child’s understanding of a complicated and devastating situation. Cornelison’s soft, impressionistic illustrations depict the all-Latinx family with light brown skin and straight, black hair and convey the overwhelming loss and sadness felt by a child longing for an absent parent. The unsmiling characters in the story feel authentic to the heaviness of this experience. Despite their separation, Maricela focuses on ways she can stay connected to her papi, through handwritten notes and especially looking up at their same mango moon. Author de Anda honors the real challenge that many children face when a parent is deported and reminds them that it’s “all right…to cry.”
Available in both Spanish and English, this story validates a heartbreaking experience. (Picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8075-4957-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
Did you like this book?
Veteran picture-book creator Polacco tells another story from her childhood that celebrates the importance of staying true to one’s own interests and values.
After years of spending summers with her father and grandmother, narrator Trisha is excited to be spending the school year in Michigan with them. Unexpectedly abandoned by her summertime friends, Trisha quickly connects with fellow outsiders Thom and Ravanne, who may be familiar to readers from Polacco’s The Junkyard Wonders (2010). Throughout the school year, the three enjoy activities together and do their best to avoid school bully Billy. While a physical confrontation between Thom (aka “Sissy Boy”) and Billy does come, so does an opportunity for Thom to defy convention and share his talent with the community. Loosely sketched watercolor illustrations place the story in the middle of the last century, with somewhat old-fashioned clothing and an apparently all-White community. Trisha and her classmates appear to be what today would be called middle schoolers; a reference to something Trisha and her mom did when she was “only eight” suggests that several years have passed since that time. As usual, the lengthy first-person narrative is cozily conversational but includes some challenging vocabulary (textiles, lackeys, foretold). The author’s note provides a brief update about her friends’ careers and encourages readers to embrace their own differences. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Deliberately inspirational and tinged with nostalgia, this will please fans but may strike others as overly idealistic. (Picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2622-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Categories: CHILDREN'S ENTERTAINMENT & SPORTS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
Did you like this book?
Sweetly low-key and totally accessible.
GET IT
Billy Miller’s second-grade year is quietly spectacular in a wonderfully ordinary way.
Billy’s year begins with his worry over the lump on his head, a souvenir of a dramatic summer fall onto concrete: Will he be up to the challenges his new teacher promises in her letter to students? Quickly overshadowing that worry, however, is a diplomatic crisis over whether he has somehow offended Ms. Silver on the first day of school. Four sections—Teacher, Father, Sister and Mother—offer different and essential focal points for Billy’s life, allowing both him and readers to explore several varieties of creative endeavor, small adventures, and, especially, both challenges and successful problem-solving. The wonderfully self-possessed Sal, his 3-year-old sister, is to Billy much as Ramona is to Beezus, but without the same level of tension. Her pillowcase full of the plush yellow whales she calls the Drop Sisters (Raindrop, Gumdrop, etc.) is a memorable prop. Henkes offers what he so often does in these longer works for children: a sense that experiences don’t have to be extraordinary to be important and dramatic. Billy’s slightly dreamy interior life isn’t filled with either angst or boisterous silliness—rather, the moments that appear in these stories are clarifying bits of the universal larger puzzle of growing up, changing and understanding the world. Small, precise black-and-white drawings punctuate and decorate the pages.
Sweetly low-key and totally accessible. (Fiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-226812-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2020 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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.
