Delectable treats plus family history make this a sweet story to share.
Zunon writes and illustrates an ode to her grandfather, a cacao worker in the Ivory Coast, through the eyes of a young girl.
As they bake their favorite chocolate cake for her birthday, the girl’s father tells her that chocolate is a gift from farmers like her grandpa, and she asks him to tell her about Grandpa Cacao again. As they mix their cake batter, the pictures show her father’s homeland, “where the air breathes hot and damp, thick with stories and music and the languages of people from tiny villages and big cities.” He describes the hard work Grandpa Cacao did on the farm, carrying heavy loads, picking ripe fruit, scooping out the cacao pods, spreading them out to dry. As they put their cake in the oven, the little girl wonders what special treat her mother is bringing home for her birthday. When the doorbell rings, she is thrilled to meet the best surprise ever. Zunon’s familiar paint-and-collage illustrations use glowing brown faces and natural tones in the girl’s story and white, screen-printed human figures against painted backgrounds in the father’s story set in the Ivory Coast. The story is replete with sensory details, and two spreads of backmatter round out the informational content, including maps, history, and a cake recipe.
Delectable treats plus family history make this a sweet story to share. (Picture book. 5-9)Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68119-640-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Emphasizing daily commonalities, this is a useful book on urban Turkish culture.
Turkey’s political situation is often in the news, but this book focuses mostly on the everyday life of a young child in Istanbul.
The English text is in a clear, Roman typeface, with alternating Turkish paragraphs set in italics. The story is bookended by morning and evening calls to prayer, when Mehmet, about 6, remarks on how the light falls on the mosque minarets at each time of day. The family is not shown praying, however, and Mehmet attends a coed secular school. “Some of Mama’s friends wear headscarves. Mama doesn’t. She says there are many paths to Allah.” The day’s highlight is a fishing trip with his brother and father. Mehmet notices “a boy my size with his mother.” They are not speaking Turkish, and the child “looks sad and hungry.” A contemporary issue creeps into the text as Mehmet’s father explains “that there are many refugees here in Istanbul.” Mehmet generously gives the boy his fishing rod. Later, Mehmet goes roller-skating at the plaza surrounding a neighborhood mosque and watches a soccer game on TV. An afterword for older readers provides some historical facts and explanations about figures mentioned in the text such as Rumi and Atatürk. Adult readers not familiar with Turkish history may wish this had been integrated directly into the text. The collages place rather static human figures assembled from cut paper and with drawn-on details into photographic backgrounds that give a sense of depth and place.
Emphasizing daily commonalities, this is a useful book on urban Turkish culture. (afterword, glossary) (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-935874-34-8
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Satya House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Visually striking and unusual, this picture book makes the myth of Sasquatch come alive.
With imaginative language and humorous imagery, this picture book takes readers deep into the life of a friendly and contemplative sasquatch who ponders why he is such a curiosity to humans. Young readers will marvel as he grows from 9 feet to 12. When he emerges from a swim in the river, his hair is dripping with water, and he leaves a puddle big enough for humans to swim in! He grooms himself, fishes and bathes in the river, and wanders a great cedar forest. He lives peacefully with bears, leaving enormous footsteps behind him as he goes. After hibernating in a cave, he meets a female sasquatch; they fall in love and have a child. The mother sasquatch weaves cedar basket after cedar basket, strong and watertight, which they leave all over the forest to gather rainwater. When another forest fire occurs, these baskets of rainwater save the whole family. The book uses composite images: photos of natural landscapes populated by two-dimensional sasquatch figures that look like make-believe cutouts filled with a wood-grain effect and marked with the iconic designs of the Pacific Northwest Native peoples. The collages give the book a funny, make-believe feel. Both author and illustrator are #ownvoices creators, the former of the Kwantlen First Nation and the latter of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation.
Visually striking and unusual, this picture book makes the myth of Sasquatch come alive. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-88971-376-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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