A warm, yet slightly distant, recollection of a childhood on the road.
For years as a child, García would travel north from Texas with her parents and 11 siblings as they worked the various fields picking tomatoes, strawberries and other produce. This succinct bilingual memoir presents the experience through brief vignettes.
The author recalls the rituals of the journey: wrapping the dishes the night before leaving; meticulously packing everything in boxes and bags; hauling the parcels to the pickup truck and camper that would be the family’s home on the road. Specific landmarks and changes in geography revealed how far they had traveled and how many miles were yet ahead. In Michigan, they reached their second home, known as Ponderosa Place, where the family worked the harvest season. As the youngest, the author did not join the others in field work but attended school, which was difficult for her as the only bilingual child. The memoir, appropriate in length and level for emerging independent readers, is heartfelt and direct. However, details that might make it resonate more deeply are sparse. The child’s experience of traveling with a family of migrant workers is presented, but the relationships within the family are not explored outside of the author’s appreciation for her family’s hard work and sacrifice.
A warm, yet slightly distant, recollection of a childhood on the road. (bilingual) (Memoir. 7-11)Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55885-780-3
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Piñata Books/Arte Público
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Chicken sexer? Breath odor evaluator? Cryptozoologist? Island caretaker? The choices dazzle! (Informational picture book....
From funeral clown to cheese sculptor, a tally of atypical trades.
This free-wheeling survey, framed as a visit to “The Great Hall of Jobs,” is designed to shake readers loose from simplistic notions of the world of work. Labarre opens with a generic sculpture gallery of, as she puts it, “The Classics”—doctor, dancer, farmer, athlete, chef, and the like—but quickly moves on, arranging busy cartoon figures by the dozen in kaleidoscopic arrays, with pithy captions describing each occupation. As changes of pace she also tucks in occasional challenges to match select workers (Las Vegas wedding minister, “ethical” hacker, motion-capture actor) with their distinctive tools or outfits. The actual chances of becoming, say, the queen’s warden of the swans or a professional mattress jumper, not to mention the nitty-gritty of physical or academic qualifications, income levels, and career paths, are left largely unspecified…but along with noting that new jobs are being invented all the time (as, in the illustration, museum workers wheel in a “vlogger” statue), the author closes with the perennial insight that it’s essential to love what you do and the millennial one that there’s nothing wrong with repeatedly switching horses midstream. The many adult figures and the gaggle of children (one in a wheelchair) visiting the “Hall” are diverse of feature, sex, and skin color.
Chicken sexer? Breath odor evaluator? Cryptozoologist? Island caretaker? The choices dazzle! (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1219-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Nosy Crow
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Gleefully providing ammunition for snarky readers eager to second-guess misguided beliefs and commands of grown-ups, Rondina dishes up the straight poop on dozens of topics from the cleanliness of a dog’s mouth and the relationship (none) between French fries and acne to whether an earwig could really crawl into your ear and eat your brains. Since she cites no readily checkable sources—support for assertions comes in the form of quotations from experts in various fields, but there is no bibliography—it’s hard to tell how accurate some of her claims are—it would be nice to have a citation to the JAMA studies that debunk the sugar-hyperactivity connection, for instance—and too often she provides only an unsatisfying “You Decide” instead of a clear “True” or “False.” Still, it all makes painless reading equally suitable for casual dipping or reading straight through, and Sylvester’s pen-and-ink spot art adds further light notes to every page. An extensive closing catalog of familiar “Parentisms”—“I’m not running a taxi service,” “Because I said so, that’s why,” etc.—adds a chuckle-inducing lagniappe. (Informational ephemera. 9-11)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55453-454-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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