A timely and heartening work.
This inspiring and soothing book is the fruition of an exhibit of the same title, featuring postcards sent by more than 50 children’s-book illustrators from around the world to express solidarity with today’s migrants.
Each postcard is a work of art; many are submitted by award-winning illustrators. Most feature birds in flight coupled with excerpts of poetry or words of encouragement: A flying ostrich does the impossible; a swallow flies across a field of gray and reveals spring behind her; six humorous bird busts accompany a message to “Fly high!”; an albatross “holds in its eye the storm / And … / The small green island of its home”—a message says that where we go becomes part of us. The brief, poetic messages and illustrations beam with encouragement. They collectively highlight the universality of the traveling experience, acknowledge loss, and find and seed hope in a better time to come. The book is organized around themes of “departures,” “long journeys,” “arrivals,” and “hope for the future.” A preface by Shaun Tan highlights the power and responsibility of spreading hope through works that talk to the imagination. This small but powerful book definitely succeeds in this aim and will appeal to readers from migrant and host communities alike, young and old.
A timely and heartening work. (Picture book. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0961-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Candlewick Studio
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
In sports, just as in every other endeavor, women have had to struggle to be accepted, let alone recognized—same as it ever was. Stout profiles five women who pioneered their gender’s place in sports theretofore the exclusive preserve of males. It might have been nearly a century ago, as in the case of swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who swam the English Channel in 1926, and Louise Stokes and Tidye Pickett, America’s first African-American women in the Olympic games (in 1932 and in Berlin’s notorious 1936 venue). More recent pioneers include the jockey Julie Krone, who won the Belmont Stakes in 1993, and Danica Patrick, who won an Indy-car race in 2008. Stout tells their stories with bubbly enthusiasm, exploring the roots of their interest and ably conveying the joy they found in their respective endeavors. Despite the high level of their achievements, he draws them as natural talents, not as freaks of nature. There is much here of perseverance and courage, of training and sacrifice, but what Stout zeroes in on is a moment of triumph, whether it be a checkered flag or breaking the color barrier. Never patronizing, he captures both grit and glory in a fast-paced package that goes down easy even as it inspires. (Collective biography. 9-12)
Pub Date: April 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-41725-7
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Sandpiper
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Hodgman looks back humorously at her 1960s childhood in the Rochester, N.Y., area, recalling incidents that pained her at the time or seem embarrassing in retrospect. There was the way she bragged about her reading before she knew better, the fourth-grade nickname (Hampton Schnoz) bestowed by a classmate she’d asked about her appearance and the total lack of athletic ability that left her at the bottom of the climbing ropes. She includes poems from her “bird sequence,” written in third grade. Not all events are mortifying. Some just reflect what it was like to be young at the time. There is the longed-for Petunia the Climbing Skunk from F.A.O. Schwartz that she didn't get for Christmas, a lovely description of birthday-party entertainments that includes Spiderweb and the Kim Game and the scary school-bus driver who threatened his misbehaving passengers with a rifle. Some anecdotes are very short; others go on for several pages. Occasional photographs of herself and her husband, as well as both their families back to their grandparents, will help readers picture these children from long ago. There is no hint of the larger political turmoil of the time. Rueful, funny and nostalgic, this will ring true to parents and grandparents and may be even more appealing to them than to a child readership—whose impression of the 1960s will be very different. (Memoir. 9-12)
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8705-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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