From the author of The Barber's Cutting Edge (1994), a flawed story that is also predictable: Wezielee, the youngest child of a large African-American sharecropper family, is left at home to cook the midday meal while the rest of her family toils in the fields. She is distracted by her wish to attend the nearby school, and meal after meal is oversalted, overcooked, overspiced, or just plain forgotten. Long before Wezielee ruins the fifth consecutive dinner, readers will have leaped ahead to the foregone conclusion: She will never be a cook, so she may as well be a scholar. Little about the family's hardscrabble life is authentically described. They are sharecroppers and migrant pickers, two very different, mutually exclusive occupations. Wezielee's father is said to be planting and weeding, but it is harvesttime, when neither activity would take place. Wezielee's thirst for learning and her long-suffering family's patience with her culinary shortcomings are attractive, as are the watercolors Griffith (David Adler's A Picture Book of Sojourner Truth, 1994) provides of the hardworking clan, with their sparsely furnished cabin and plain, worn clothes. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-8234-1185-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A contemporary Native American girl follows in her grandmother’s footsteps (literally and figuratively), dancing the traditional jingle dance at the powwow. Jenna, a member of the Creek Nation in Oklahoma, dreams of dancing the jingle dance with the women of her tribe and is delighted when her grandmother tells her that she can dance with the other girls at the next powwow. But there is one problem—there won’t be enough time to order the materials to make the four rows of jingles that are attached to the dress. If Jenna wants to hear the tink, tink, tink sound that the tin jingles make, she’ll have to figure out a way to get the jingles on her own. Fortunately, Jenna is resourceful and knows just what to do. She visits great-aunt Sis, her friend Mrs. Scott, and cousin Elizabeth and borrows a row of jingles from each of them. (Jenna can only borrow one row of jingles apiece—otherwise each dress will lose its “voice.”) While the problem of finding the jingles on her own doesn’t seem challenging enough for the approbation Jenna receives at the end of the story for her resourcefulness, children will enjoy watching her figure out the solution to her problem. The watercolor illustrations clearly and realistically depict what is happening in the story. The layout of the book is straightforward—mostly double-page spreads that extend all the way to the edges of the paper. Jenna lives in what looks like a nice suburban house, the others seem solidly middle-class, and cousin Elizabeth is a lawyer. The author is deliberately showing us, it would seem, that all Native Americans are not poor or live on rundown reservations. A useful portrayal of an important cultural event in a Creek girl’s year. (author’s note, glossary) (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: April 30, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-16241-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
At her best, Rylant’s (The Ticky-Tacky Doll, below, etc.) sweetness and sentiment fills the heart; in this outing, however, sentimentality reigns and the end result is pretty gooey. Pandora keeps a lighthouse: her destiny is to protect ships at sea. She’s lonely, but loves her work. She rescues Seabold and heals his broken leg, and he stays on to mend his shipwrecked boat. This wouldn’t be so bad but Pandora’s a cat and Seabold a dog, although they are anthropomorphized to the max. Then the duo rescue three siblings—mice!—and make a family together, although Rylant is careful to note that Pandora and Seabold each have their own room. Choosing what you love, caring for others, making a family out of love, it is all very well, but this capsizes into silliness. Formatted to look like the start of a new series. Oh, dear. (Fiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-689-84880-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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