Nevertheless, it’s an engaging entry in a winning series.
Anholt continues his series of introductory picture books about the artists with this entry on Marc Chagall.
As he did in Cézanne and the Apple Boy (2009), Anholt uses the artist’s relationship with a child—in this case, children—as a hook to draw young readers in. Here “Papa” Chagall’s twin grandchildren elicit a sequence of anecdotes in which Chagall relates the story of his life, from his impoverished childhood in the Russian shtetl, through meeting his wife, moving to Paris and fleeing the Nazis, to success in his old age. Loose, warm ink-and-watercolor paintings depict children and grandfather against relaxing expanses of white space, with dream-bubble insets illustrating Chagall’s memories. Reproductions of some of his more famous paintings are incorporated, with child-friendly glosses: “The twins saw…a weird cat on a windowsill….” The boy Chagall’s penchant for surrealism is validated in his first patron’s reaction: “These paintings are funny!…But they are very, very good.” By and large, Anholt’s simple narrative approach works well, though his glossing over the Holocaust with the summation that “[s]ome bad people came—they hated me and they did not like my paintings” will mystify children, particularly when juxtaposed with images of destruction in both memory and Chagall’s own reproduced work. Though the Holocaust is discussed in a biographical note at the end, it’s too bad it’s not confronted more directly in the text.
Nevertheless, it’s an engaging entry in a winning series. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7641-6644-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Barron's
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A succinct, edifying read, but don’t buy it for the pictures.
Abraham Lincoln’s ascent to the presidency is recounted in a fluid, easy-to-read biography for early readers.
Simple, direct sentences stress Lincoln’s humble upbringing, his honesty, and his devotion to acting with moral conviction. “Lincoln didn’t seem like a man who would be president one day. But he studied hard and became a lawyer. He cared about people and about justice.” Slavery and Lincoln’s signature achievement of emancipation are explained in broad yet defined, understandable analogies. “At that time, in the South, the law let white people own black people, just as they owned a house or a horse.” Readers are clearly given the president’s perspective through some documented memorable quotes from his own letters. “Lincoln did not like slavery. ‘If slavery is not wrong,’ he wrote to a friend ‘nothing is wrong.’ ” (The text does not clarify that this letter was written in 1865 and not before he ascended to the presidency, as implied by the book.) As the war goes on and Lincoln makes his decision to free the slaves in the “Southern states”—“a bold move”—Lincoln’s own words describe his thinking: “ ‘If my name ever goes into history,’ Lincoln said, ‘it will be for this act.’ ” A very basic timeline, which mentions the assassination unaddressed in the text, is followed by backmatter providing photographs, slightly more detailed historical information, and legacy. It’s a pity that the text is accompanied by unremarkable, rudimentary opaque paintings.
A succinct, edifying read, but don’t buy it for the pictures. (Informational early reader. 6-8)Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243256-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Stirring encouragement for all “little people” with “big dreams.” (Picture book/biography. 5-7)
“There’s nothing I can’t be,” young Maya thinks, and then shows, in this profile for newly independent readers, imported from Spain.
The inspirational message is conveyed through a fine skein of biographical details. It begins with her birth in St. Louis and the prejudice she experienced growing up in a small Arkansas town and closes with her reading of a poem “about her favorite thing: hope” at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. In between, it mentions the (unspecified) “attack” by her mother’s boyfriend and subsequent elective muteness she experienced as a child, as well as some of the varied pursuits that preceded her eventual decision to become a writer. Kaiser goes on in a closing spread to recap Angelou’s life and career, with dates, beneath a quartet of portrait photos. Salaberria’s simple illustrations, filled with brown-skinned figures, are more idealized than photorealistic, but, though only in the cover image do they make direct contact with readers’, Angelou’s huge eyes are an effective focal point in each scene. The message is similar in the co-published Amelia Earhart, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara (and also translated by Pitt), but the pictures are more fanciful as illustrator Mariadiamantes endows the aviator with a mane of incandescent orange hair and sends her flying westward (in contradiction of the text and history) on her final around-the-world flight.
Stirring encouragement for all “little people” with “big dreams.” (Picture book/biography. 5-7)Pub Date: July 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-84780-889-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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