A sweetly illustrated story about childhood anxiety and family ties.
Parents pack for a trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Weidler’s (Ogs and the Oggie Joggie, 2011) children’s picture book.
Mother and Father wake up early one morning and begin to pack, but Baby is still sleeping, so they must be very quiet. The narrator asks the reader: What are they packing for? The answer: a trip to Baby’s grandparents’ house. The car is quickly loaded, and finally, Baby awakes. Mother and Father gather all of Baby’s things, from clothes to toys to bib, but Baby begins to cry; “Don’t Forget the Baby!” says the narrator. Mother and Father assure Baby that they would never forget him; in fact, Baby is the whole reason they’re going to visit Grandma and Grandpa. The family packs into the car, and the next scene shows Grandma and Grandpa welcoming the young family with arms outstretched. “We are so glad to see the Baby!” say Grandma and Grandpa. Baby is happy; he knows that his family loves him and would never, ever forget him. Weidler (aka “Grandpappy Joe”) depicts everyday, charmingly nostalgic scenes of a 1950s family. The storyline is simple, and pre-readers and beginning readers will recognize and empathize with the baby’s anxiety over seemingly being ignored; the parents’ love and reassurance will likely bring a smile of delight to young readers’ faces. Haller’s beautiful images are authentic for the time period. Even when there’s nothing new or exciting going on, the seemingly purposeful repetition of some images may be well suited to the book’s very young audience. There are a few awkward rhymes and inconsistencies (for example, the baby is referred to as both “Baby” and “the Baby”), but the story is, for the most part, solid.
A sweetly illustrated story about childhood anxiety and family ties.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1466387881
Page Count: 38
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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