Stomping down the road, away from her all-male family in a rage, Liz meets ancient Sally Beck, who invites her into the local manor's topiary garden to hear how she once became a boy. Fleeing her own family, Sally donned her brother's clothes, changed her name to Jack, and found a job as a gardener's boy. Though forced to unmask after several years, she was allowed to stay on, becoming at last head gardener and living out her days surrounded by carefully trimmed, oddly shaped greenery. Liz finds both disturbed dreams and solace in Sally's tale: visions of horned figures and huge shears, but also, ultimately, a firmer sense of self as well. For a story about transformation, what better illustrator than Browne? His seven enigmatic paintings feature looming, massive topiary, in which an occasional female body is the only recognizable shape, and garden tools or shadows the only sign of habitation. This strange, subtle episode, originally published in Howker's Badger on the Barge and Other Stories (Greenwillow, 1984), stands on its own in this small, neat volume, printed in well proportioned but tiny type. Thoughtful readers shouldn't be bothered by the many Briticisms, but there's an appended glossary just in case. (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-531-06891-9
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
Pitamic bites off more than she can chew with this instructional art volume, but its core projects will excite in the right context. Twelve pieces of fine art inspire two art projects apiece. Matisse’s The Snail opens the Color section; after history and analysis, there’s one project arranging multicolored tissue-paper squares and one project adding hue to white paint to create stripes of value gradation. These creative endeavors exploring value, shade, texture and various media will exhilarate young artists—but only with at best semi-successful results, as they require an adult dedicated to both advance material procurement and doing the artwork along with the child. Otherwise, complex instructions plus a frequent requirement to draw or trace realistically will cause frustration. Much of the text is above children’s heads, errors of terminology and reproduction detract and the links between the famous pieces and the projects are imprecise. However, an involved adult and an enterprising child aged seven to ten will find many of the projects fabulously challenging and rewarding. Art In Action 2 (ISBN: 978-0-7641-441-7) publishes simultaneously. (artist biographies, glossary, location of originals) (Nonfiction. Adults)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7641-4440-0
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Barron's
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
Reading like a long term paper, this dry, abstract recitation of teams and players brings neither the game nor the people who played and are playing it to life. McKissack (with Patricia C. McKissack, Black Diamond, 1994, not reviewed, etc.) opens with a chapter on basketball’s invention and original rules, closes with a look at women’s basketball, and in between chronicles the growth of amateur, college, and pro ball, adding clipped quotes, technical observations about changing styles of play and vague comments about how players black and white respected each other. The information is evidently drawn entirely from previously published books and interviews. A modest selection of black-and-white photographs give faces to some of the many names the author drops, but readers won’t find much more about individual players beyond an occasional biographical or statistical tidbit. McKissack frequently points to parallels in the history of African Americans in basketball and in baseball, but this account comes off as sketchy and unfocused compared to Black Diamond. (glossary, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-48712-4
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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