``Things are changing in our country,'' so Jafta's father, who has ``been in the city, making money for us, working down a deep hole in the ground,'' can come home. ``He's left a big hole in our lives,'' too, the boy confides, listing important things his father has missed—the harvest, a wedding, the period when the family dog—now full grown—was a pup, a freedom rally. The sepia illustrations for this poignantly simple story are not as showy as Rachel Isadora's watercolors for At the Crossroads (1991), but they have a touching authenticity and a deft interplay between beautifully observed figures, a delicately suggested landscape, and ample white space. It may take an adult to interpret the political content; the only place it's stated that the country is South Africa is in the CIP, but many children may know Jafta from his previous appearances with various publishers and on Reading Rainbow. (Picture book. 3-7)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-84722-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
Shining with palpable pride for family and home.
Carlitos’ yearning for his father takes him on a clandestine solo trip to Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, to find him.
In the town of Cataño, across the titular bay from the capital, Carlitos lives with his mother, his abuela, and their cat, Coco. Carlitos’ “family didn’t look like the others.” The neighborhood children play basketball, learn to ride a bike, or do housework with their fathers while Carlitos goes to the barbershop with only his mother. When Carlitos asks about Papi’s whereabouts, his mother reassures him that his father is across the bay—that “sometimes things don’t work out.” Even though he is happy with his family, a desire for more sets Carlitos on a ferry with Papi’s photo in hand. Vibrant illustrations with an inviting tropical palette draw readers in as Carlitos searches high and low for Papi. A refreshingly varied spectrum of brown shades of skin abounds in colorful city scenes. Wide-angle perspectives effectively emphasize emotional scale: the vastness of San Juan Bay, Carlitos’ sense of his own smallness as he searches for his father in the “maze” of the old capital, and his despair at his journey’s end. Aponte’s decision to leave Carlitos’ quest unresolved is an honest one, and readers will respond to this beautiful depiction of a young boy’s physical and emotional journey within a deeply cultural setting.
Shining with palpable pride for family and home. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-8662-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Will make readers fall in love with the city depicted within.
From a nurse to an emergency dispatcher, a look at the city dwellers whose work begins when the sun goes down.
Reading this book is like looking through a telescope—there are windows on nearly every page; some pages feature rectangular, windowlike vignettes of people at work. On the front cover, a taxi driver is visible through the side window of a cab, with a dog sitting up in the back seat. Above them, on an upper floor, a museum worker is doing some vacuuming, with dinosaur bones in the background. Many of the people can be seen only from a great distance, and the details we learn about them often come from just a few spare sentences: “The museum is closed, but the janitor and security guard are hard at work.” Downing’s blue-tinged, cozy artwork sometimes makes words almost unnecessary—in this case, the accompanying illustration says it all, a full spread showing the janitor reaching up to dust the nose of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. Most of the people who are working late seem to be smiling, and while it’s difficult to find a message in the limited text, readers will close the book feeling that there’s joy to be found in every job and every schedule. The residents of this urban environment are diverse in skin tone. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Will make readers fall in love with the city depicted within. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-8234-5206-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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