This heartening, well-crafted story refreshingly places its emphasis on its protagonist’s resilience.
Based on a true refugee story, this deep and hopeful book sports colorful, simplified shapes depicting students and their teacher.
Stein does not attempt realistic depictions. The children look like jelly beans with limbs, facial features, and hair, and their all-blue teacher is only very slightly more detailed; all are digitally collaged over black-and-white photos of a Western classroom. This surprisingly effective choice allows readers to concentrate on the characters’ emotions. One day Ms. Truong asks her students to draw a memory from the places where they were born. A bike, a bowl of rice, children running through tall grass—and bricks and kids with crabby faces are some of what the students draw. The children each talk about their drawings and their cultures, things they like, dislike, or miss, and the teacher offers support and consolation when needed. When it is Shahad’s turn, she says that the bricks she drew are what inflicted the scar on her face and made her leg look the way it does. Shahad’s bubbly illustration does have scars next to her eye and on her knee. As Shahad leaves the classroom that day, Ms. Truong compliments her perfectly braided hair. With continued support, Shahad eventually asks, “Do you think I’m beautiful?” “I think you are spectacularly beautiful,” the teacher responds. Beautiful Shahad grows more confident and will pleasantly surprise with similar support to others the following year. Readers will likely infer that Shahad is from Syria or Iraq.
This heartening, well-crafted story refreshingly places its emphasis on its protagonist’s resilience. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-57687-891-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: POW!
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
The dynamic interaction between the characters invites readers to take risks, push boundaries, and have a little unscripted...
Reinvention is the name of the game for two blobs of clay.
A blue-eyed gray blob and a brown-eyed brown blob sit side by side, unsure as to what’s going to happen next. The gray anticipates an adventure, while the brown appears apprehensive. A pair of hands descends, and soon, amid a flurry of squishing and prodding and poking and sculpting, a handsome gray wolf and a stately brown owl emerge. The hands disappear, leaving the friends to their own devices. The owl is pleased, but the wolf convinces it that the best is yet to come. An ear pulled here and an extra eye placed there, and before you can shake a carving stick, a spurt of frenetic self-exploration—expressed as a tangled black scribble—reveals a succession of smug hybrid beasts. After all, the opportunity to become a “pig-e-phant” doesn’t come around every day. But the sound of approaching footsteps panics the pair of Picassos. How are they going to “fix [them]selves” on time? Soon a hippopotamus and peacock are staring bug-eyed at a returning pair of astonished hands. The creative naiveté of the “clay mates” is perfectly captured by Petty’s feisty, spot-on dialogue: “This was your idea…and it was a BAD one.” Eldridge’s endearing sculpted images are photographed against the stark white background of an artist’s work table to great effect.
The dynamic interaction between the characters invites readers to take risks, push boundaries, and have a little unscripted fun of their own . (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-30311-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
The story’s slight but allows kids to practice identifying and dealing with their own big feelings.
The diverse group of kids from All Are Welcome (2018) this time gathers in a vacant lot with tools in hand to clear the debris and make something new. But therein lies the rub: What should the something new be? While the exact nature of the disagreement is unfortunately not made clear to readers, the big feelings that the children exhibit are very clear (and for readers who need practice reading facial clues, there’s a labeled chart of 15 in the frontmatter). This book’s refrain is “How can I help? / What can we do?” And the answers, spread over several pages and not spelled out in so many words but rather shown in the illustrations, are: talk it through, compromise, and see things from another perspective. As a guide for dealing with feelings and problem-solving, the book is a bit slim and lacks a solid story to hook readers. But, as with its predecessor, its strength is again the diversity on display in its pages. There’s a rainbow of skin tones and hair colors as well as abundant variation in hair texture, several children exhibit visible disabilities, including one child who uses a wheelchair, and there are markers of religious and cultural diversity. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 29.6% of actual size.)
The story’s slight but allows kids to practice identifying and dealing with their own big feelings. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-57974-8
Page Count: 42
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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