An homage to home-cooked, plant-based meals, hampered by unanswered questions.
A picture book and cookbook promoting healthy eating for children 7 to 10.
Prince Peter of Sunnyvale, a picky eater, enjoys an alliterative diet, including meatballs on Monday and soup on Saturday. When he declares that his diet shall now be everyone’s, his edict is enforced via the distribution of factory-made food. But soon, nobody in Sunnyvale feels well. The prince’s advisers recommend food additives to help solve the problem, but neither vitamins nor extra flavorings improve the community’s health. Then Peter meets the royal gardener, Mrs. Sunbody, and her children, who are the only energetic people in Sunnyvale. Mrs. Sunbody, hoping to help the prince feel better, invites him to dinner, where she serves him his mandated menu, but with a twist—a secret ingredient. After she feeds the Prince and his advisers for a week, she reveals the secret: Everything they’ve eaten comes from plants, which promote health, she says, because they store energy from the sun. When an adviser suggests that the prince implement this wisdom in his factory-made meals, Farmer Sunbody delivers the book’s overt message: “[S]unny food is grown by living plants, not manufactured in processing plants.” Mrs. Sunbody becomes Peter’s food consultant, and as a result, “the people of Sunnyvale will live healthily and happily ever after!” Fun illustrations by Fillius and enticing recipes complete the picture. (Calling all of the recipes’ food-preparation steps “fun,” however, doesn’t actually make them so.) The story has a few confusing issues: Peter’s stated problem is pickiness, but the story doesn’t support this. His food choices aren’t that limited, nor is he unhealthy, until the factory versions of his food become standard fare. The fact that he’s surprised by the Sunbodies’ vegetarian versions suggests that his own diet contained meat, but this is never directly addressed. And although there’s nothing wrong with encouraging children to try vegetarian foods, the book provides no substantiation that there was anything wrong with Peter’s previous “picky” diet, which was also prepared with fresh, high-quality ingredients.
An homage to home-cooked, plant-based meals, hampered by unanswered questions.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692257555
Page Count: 30
Publisher: Good Eats Teach
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.
A slim volume of largely gay-themed writings with pessimistic overtones.
Poe (Simple Simon, 2013, etc.) divides this collection of six short stories and 34 poems into five sections: “Art,” “Death,” “Relationship,” “Being,” and “Reflection.” Significantly, a figurative death at the age of 7 appears in two different poems, in which the author uses the phrase “a pretended life” to refer to the idea of hiding one’s true nature and performing socially enforced gender roles. This is a well-worn trope, but it will be powerful and resonant for many who have struggled with a stigmatized identity. In a similar vein, “Imaginary Tom” presents the remnants of a faded relationship: “Now we are imaginary friends, different in each other’s thoughts, / I the burden you seek to discard, / you the lover I created from the mist of longing.” Once in a while, short story passages practically leap off of the page, such as this evocative description of a seedy establishment in Lincoln, Nebraska: “It was a dimly lit bar that smelled of rodent piss, with barstools that danced on uneven legs and made the patrons wonder if they were drunker than they thought.” In “Valéry’s Ride,” Poe examines the familial duties that often fall to unmarried and childless people, keeping them from forming meaningful bonds with others. In this story, after the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hits Louisiana, Valéry’s extended family needs him more than ever; readers will likely root for the gay protagonist as he makes the difficult decision to strike out on his own. Not all of Poe’s main characters are gay; the heterosexual title character in “Mrs. Calumet’s Workspace,” for instance, pursues employment in order to escape the confines of her home and a passionless marriage. Working as a bookkeeper, she attempts to carve out a space for herself, symbolized by changes in her work area. Still, this story echoes the recurring theme of lives unlived due to forces often beyond one’s control.
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5168-3693-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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