A biography that seeks to illuminate the life of an artistic genius but offers instead an enumeration of details about her...
Ruth Asawa’s life emphasizes the values of perseverance and creativity in the face of extreme adversity.
During World War II, Ruth’s family is rounded up and sent to internment camps, separated from their farm where Ruth grew up and found her first artistic inspiration. Still, she finds opportunities to study art and develop her vision, work she continues in adulthood as she discovers how to bend wire and make “sculptures of wire and air”—one of her signature creations. Others include fountains in San Francisco and a park to commemorate the internment camps. Declarative, straightforward text takes readers through her life, lacking, though, any warmth and details that would have breathed life into the story of this visionary artist. Instead, well-researched information will serve as useful educational material, including the backmatter, which offers photos to complement the realistic illustrations, rendered in dark tones throughout the book. Ruth often appears in green amid seas of brown and gray clothing worn by the families in the internment camps, helping her to stand out. Descriptions of life in the camp are sparse, limited to one double-page spread that mentions art class but depicts barbed wire, lines, and barracks as well as interior accommodations that resemble a child’s room in a home.
A biography that seeks to illuminate the life of an artistic genius but offers instead an enumeration of details about her experiences. (author’s note, list of public sculpture) (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4556-2397-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Pelican
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
An inspiring introduction to the young Nobel Peace Prize winner and a useful conversation starter.
The latest of many picture books about the young heroine from Pakistan, this one is narrated by Malala herself, with a frame that is accessible to young readers.
Malala introduces her story using a television show she used to watch about a boy with a magic pencil that he used to get himself and his friends out of trouble. Readers can easily follow Malala through her own discovery of troubles in her beloved home village, such as other children not attending school and soldiers taking over the village. Watercolor-and-ink illustrations give a strong sense of setting, while gold ink designs overlay Malala’s hopes onto her often dreary reality. The story makes clear Malala’s motivations for taking up the pen to tell the world about the hardships in her village and only alludes to the attempt on her life, with a black page (“the dangerous men tried to silence me. / But they failed”) and a hospital bracelet on her wrist the only hints of the harm that came to her. Crowds with signs join her call before she is shown giving her famous speech before the United Nations. Toward the end of the book, adult readers may need to help children understand Malala’s “work,” but the message of holding fast to courage and working together is powerful and clear.
An inspiring introduction to the young Nobel Peace Prize winner and a useful conversation starter. (Picture book/memoir. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-31957-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Blandly laudatory.
The iconic animator introduces young readers to each “happy place” in his life.
The tally begins with his childhood home in Marceline, Missouri, and climaxes with Disneyland (carefully designed to be “the happiest place on Earth”), but the account really centers on finding his true happy place, not on a map but in drawing. In sketching out his early flubs and later rocket to the top, the fictive narrator gives Ub Iwerks and other Disney studio workers a nod (leaving his labor disputes with them unmentioned) and squeezes in quick references to his animated films, from Steamboat Willie to Winnie the Pooh (sans Fantasia and Song of the South). Eliopoulos incorporates stills from the films into his cartoon illustrations and, characteristically for this series, depicts Disney as a caricature, trademark mustache in place on outsized head even in childhood years and child sized even as an adult. Human figures default to white, with occasional people of color in crowd scenes and (ahistorically) in the animation studio. One unidentified animator builds up the role-modeling with an observation that Walt and Mickey were really the same (“Both fearless; both resourceful”). An assertion toward the end—“So when do you stop being a child? When you stop dreaming”—muddles the overall follow-your-bliss message. A timeline to the EPCOT Center’s 1982 opening offers photos of the man with select associates, rodent and otherwise. An additional series entry, I Am Marie Curie, publishes simultaneously, featuring a gowned, toddler-sized version of the groundbreaking physicist accepting her two Nobel prizes.
Blandly laudatory. (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2875-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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