It may take readers a few rounds to fully appreciate and understand the loose, unassumingly sophisticated narrative that...
This slim volume of more than four dozen poems of varying lengths charts the narrator’s course from childhood in low-income urban housing to adolescence to young adulthood and fatherhood.
The unnamed narrator personifies the unforgiving public-housing tower block as a “zombie” hungry for human lives and memories. He dodges a bully in “Smashing Snails in the Rain” and overhears an “Argument”: “The monster / With a roar made up of shouts,” whose “jaws snap / Like slamming doors” and whose “claws clatter / Like kitchen drawers.” His father gives him the perfect pair of red sneakers in “Trainers.” These shoes return many times across the collection, acting as a possible symbol of the boy’s hero worship of his often absent father. As the boy enters his teens, he goes from confident to awkward to embracing the changes his body experiences in “Man…I Had It Made.” In later poems, he has his first kiss, gets exam results, and leaves home for the first time. He becomes a father, “whose heart thumps solely for his / daughter.” Poetic forms vary, with some rhyming and others not. Readers may have difficulty understanding the trilogy of sophisticated poems based on the myth of Prometheus. Race is not mentioned, and the flat, unemotional black-and-white sketches provide few clues.
It may take readers a few rounds to fully appreciate and understand the loose, unassumingly sophisticated narrative that joins the poems. (Poetry. 10-13)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-91095-958-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Otter-Barry
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
A rich and deeply felt slice of life.
Crafting fantasy worlds offers a budding middle school author relief and distraction from the real one in this graphic memoir debut.
Everyone in Tori’s life shows realistic mixes of vulnerability and self-knowledge while, equally realistically, seeming to be making it up as they go. At least, as she shuttles between angrily divorced parents—dad becoming steadily harder to reach, overstressed mom spectacularly incapable of reading her offspring—or drifts through one wearingly dull class after another, she has both vivacious bestie Taylor Lee and, promisingly, new classmate Nick as well as the (all-girl) heroic fantasy, complete with portals, crystal amulets, and evil enchantments, taking shape in her mind and on paper. The flow of school projects, sleepovers, heart-to-heart conversations with Taylor, and like incidents (including a scene involving Tori’s older brother, who is having a rough adolescence, that could be seen as domestic violence) turns to a tide of change as eighth grade winds down and brings unwelcome revelations about friends. At least the story remains as solace and, at the close, a sense that there are still chapters to come in both worlds. Working in a simple, expressive cartoon style reminiscent of Raina Telgemeier’s, Sharp captures facial and body language with easy naturalism. Most people in the spacious, tidily arranged panels are White; Taylor appears East Asian, and there is diversity in background characters.
A rich and deeply felt slice of life. (afterword, design notes) (Graphic memoir. 10-13)Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-53889-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
A sampler worth sampling, despite pallid illustrations and a roster entirely made up of dead or veteran poets.
Kitted out—as usual for volumes in the Poetry for Young People series—with biographical headers and an outstanding introductory overview, the 33 short selections follow a generally chronological course. Atypically, the editors steer largely clear of explicit racial or religious themes in their selections. Phillis Wheatley’s pointed “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train,” and James Weldon Johnson’s “The Creation” stand as exceptions. Along with contributions from James Baldwin and Richard Wright (both better known for their prose), notable additions to the standard African-American poetic canon include 19th-century writers George Moses Horton and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. More-recent meditations from Melvin Dixon (b. 1950) and Elizabeth Alexander (b. 1962) also help to freshen up the collection. Sadly, what vivacity these poems retain is sucked dry by Barbour’s monotonous successions of sad, big-eyed faces and drably colored collages. Well-intentioned, and at least as valuable for its editorial additions as its lyric contents. (index) (Poetry. 10-13)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4027-1689-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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