Peculiarly beautiful.
A famous female painter’s memory, explored.
Using a 1950 entry from Kahlo’s diary (translated by an agency), Folì brings the real and the imaginary together to show the worlds within Kahlo. Recalling a memory from when she was 6, Frida recounts how she formed an “intense imaginary friendship with a girl” her age. To visit this friend, Frida would draw a door while looking out her window, exit through it, and jump through the sign of the Pinzón creamery. At first, Folì’s use of color in the illustrations is minimal, highlighting minute details like small plants and polka dots. But when Frida dives “through the Ó” in the sign, she enters a world of color and life. Folì’s take on Frida’s imagination is populated with colorful Mexican folk elements that make appearances in the artist’s later work. In this world, Frida becomes her artistic self, donning her floral headband and following her imaginary friend’s cues as they dance. When Frida leaves the imaginary world, a more-colorful real one awaits her, as some characters escape. Folì’s artwork goes beyond the typical bushy eyebrows that characterize Kahlo and focuses on the imaginative aspects of the world created by Frida. The backmatter gives insight to her life as a child who battled an illness that caused her to limp and the importance that being from Mexico played in her art.
Peculiarly beautiful. (Picture book/memoir. 5-8)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7643-6116-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Schiffer
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
A sweet and endearing feathered migration.
A relationship between a Latina grandmother and her mixed-race granddaughter serves as the frame to depict the ruby-throated hummingbird migration pattern.
In Granny’s lap, a girl is encouraged to “keep still” as the intergenerational pair awaits the ruby-throated hummingbirds with bowls of water in their hands. But like the granddaughter, the tz’unun—“the word for hummingbird in several [Latin American] languages”—must soon fly north. Over the next several double-page spreads, readers follow the ruby-throated hummingbird’s migration pattern from Central America and Mexico through the United States all the way to Canada. Davies metaphorically reunites the granddaughter and grandmother when “a visitor from Granny’s garden” crosses paths with the girl in New York City. Ray provides delicately hashed lines in the illustrations that bring the hummingbirds’ erratic flight pattern to life as they travel north. The watercolor palette is injected with vibrancy by the addition of gold ink, mirroring the hummingbirds’ flashing feathers in the slants of light. The story is supplemented by notes on different pages with facts about the birds such as their nest size, diet, and flight schedule. In addition, a note about ruby-throated hummingbirds supplies readers with detailed information on how ornithologists study and keep track of these birds.
A sweet and endearing feathered migration. (bibliography, index) (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0538-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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