Despite the Beatles-reminiscent title, this offering concerns itself with not four, but five of the Founding Dads: John (Hancock), Paul (Revere), George (Washington), Ben (Franklin) and Tom (Jefferson). Each is imagined in his youth, identified by one characteristic that becomes key to his involvement in the American Revolution. John is bold, writing his name large on the blackboard; Paul is noisy, bellowing out customers’ orders in his family’s shop; George is honest, confessing to the chopping down of not only the cherry tree, but the whole orchard; Ben is clever, sharing his aphorisms with all who will listen; and Tom is independent, making a model of Monticello instead of a birdhouse out of “ye olde balsa wood.” Smith’s faux-antiqued illustrations deliver bucket-loads of zany energy, but his text lacks his sometime partner Jon Scieszka’s focus. While there is a hallowed place for irreverence in children’s literature, one might wish for a work that more evenly balances humor with substance. Still, this may serve as an entry point for kids who think that history is dry as dust, and “Ye Olde True or False Section” really is pretty funny. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7868-4893-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Celebrated collaborators deliver another thoughtful delight, revealing how “making marks” links us across time and space.
The light-skinned, redheaded narrator journeys alone as flight attendants supply snacks to diverse, interspecies passengers. The kid muses, “Sometimes they ask me, ‘Why are you always going to the farthest planet?’ ”The response comes after the traveler hurtles through the solar system, lands, and levitates up to the platform where a welcoming grandmother waits: “Because it’s worth it / to cross one universe / to explore another.” Indeed, child and grandmother enter an egg-shaped, clear-domed orb and fly over a teeming savanna and a towering waterfall before disembarking, donning headlamps, and entering a cave. Inside, the pair marvel at a human handprint and ancient paintings of animals including horses, bison, and horned rhinoceroses. Yockteng’s skilled, vigorously shaded pictures suggest references to images found in Lascaux and Chauvet Cave in France. As the holiday winds down, grandmother gives the protagonist some colored pencils that had belonged to grandfather generations back. (She appears to chuckle over a nude portrait of her younger self.) The pencils “were good for making marks on paper. She gave me that too.” The child draws during the return trip, documenting the visit and sights along the journey home. “Because what I could see was infinity.” (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.8-by-19.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 85% of actual size.)
Celebrated collaborators deliver another thoughtful delight, revealing how “making marks” links us across time and space. (Picture book. 5-9)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77306-172-6
Page Count: 52
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A child’s-eye view of the day Rosa Parks would not give up her seat. On Dec. 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Ala., a boy and his mom sit at the back of the bus, and he amuses himself by rolling his tiger’s-eye marble down the bus aisle. “Mrs. Parks from the tailor shop” rolls it back to him. Soon the bus is packed, but it does not move. The boy, acutely sensitive to the tone of his mother’s and the driver’s voices, wonders what is happening, but he sees that, like his mama, Parks has her “strong chin.” She’s taken away, the bus goes home and the boy holds his brown-and-golden marble to the light, thinking he does not have to hide it anymore. The language is rhythmic and inflected with dropped gs, with slightly overdone description, but clearly explains to very young children Parks’s refusal to give up her seat at the front of the bus to a white man. Cooper uses his “subtractive method” on oil color, in which illustrations are rubbed out or lightened, making the pictures glow with burnished grace. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-25091-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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