An easily digestible true story that gives wartime women their due.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor inspires a young American woman to join a top-secret military group operating in the Hawaiian Islands in this nonfiction illustrated children’s book by Moore.
The author tells the real-life story of Gracie Hudlow, who, at age 18, joined the Women’s Air Raid Defense, which operated from an underground bunker on Oahu Island, Hawaii, from 1942 to 1945. The function of the WARD was to monitor, via radar, all surrounding air traffic. Moore’s text offers a simple narrative account (“With training complete and nerves under control, we moved to the plotting room with a new sense of urgency and confidence in our ability to perform well under extreme pressure”), avoiding any war-derived angst (the death of her fiance, for instance, is omitted from the text and referred to only in the scrapbook addendum, a valuable resource that includes sepia photos that bring home the historicity of Gracie’s experiences). Meredith offers full-page, often double-spread illustrations that evoke something of both Quentin Blake’s color technique and the physiognomy-accentuating, limited-palette propaganda posters that were prominent during World War II. While text boxes occasionally block some of their content, these pictures vividly capture the styles and attitudes of the era. Gracie is identifiable in the illustrations by her long, curly hair, lipstick, and rouged cheeks. She is at times difficult to distinguish from the other women depicted, but this is not an artistic failure so much as a reflection on the homogeneity of the WARD, which the photographic evidence corroborates as having been made up of almost exclusively White Americans. An illustrated timeline of the WARD provides a neat overview of this fascinating, lesser-known contribution to the American war effort.
An easily digestible true story that gives wartime women their due.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781952467110
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Kc Monkeybug Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Visually accomplished but marred by stereotypical cultural depictions.
Ellis, known for her illustrations for Colin Meloy’s Wildwood series, here riffs on the concept of “home.”
Shifting among homes mundane and speculative, contemporary and not, Ellis begins and ends with views of her own home and a peek into her studio. She highlights palaces and mansions, but she also takes readers to animal homes and a certain famously folkloric shoe (whose iconic Old Woman manages a passel of multiethnic kids absorbed in daring games). One spread showcases “some folks” who “live on the road”; a band unloads its tour bus in front of a theater marquee. Ellis’ compelling ink and gouache paintings, in a palette of blue-grays, sepia and brick red, depict scenes ranging from mythical, underwater Atlantis to a distant moonscape. Another spread, depicting a garden and large building under connected, transparent domes, invites readers to wonder: “Who in the world lives here? / And why?” (Earth is seen as a distant blue marble.) Some of Ellis’ chosen depictions, oddly juxtaposed and stripped of any historical or cultural context due to the stylized design and spare text, become stereotypical. “Some homes are boats. / Some homes are wigwams.” A sailing ship’s crew seems poised to land near a trio of men clad in breechcloths—otherwise unidentified and unremarked upon.
Visually accomplished but marred by stereotypical cultural depictions. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6529-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity.
A collection of parental wishes for a child.
It starts out simply enough: two children run pell-mell across an open field, one holding a high-flying kite with the line “I wish you more ups than downs.” But on subsequent pages, some of the analogous concepts are confusing or ambiguous. The line “I wish you more tippy-toes than deep” accompanies a picture of a boy happily swimming in a pool. His feet are visible, but it's not clear whether he's floating in the deep end or standing in the shallow. Then there's a picture of a boy on a beach, his pockets bulging with driftwood and colorful shells, looking frustrated that his pockets won't hold the rest of his beachcombing treasures, which lie tantalizingly before him on the sand. The line reads: “I wish you more treasures than pockets.” Most children will feel the better wish would be that he had just the right amount of pockets for his treasures. Some of the wordplay, such as “more can than knot” and “more pause than fast-forward,” will tickle older readers with their accompanying, comical illustrations. The beautifully simple pictures are a sweet, kid- and parent-appealing blend of comic-strip style and fine art; the cast of children depicted is commendably multiethnic.
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4521-2699-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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