An engaging Christian poem with plenty of striking illustrations.
A volume offers an epic prose poem and artworks that center on the worship of Jesus.
Marianne Moessner Chen’s prose poem details Jesus’ mission, birth, life, eventual death, and resurrection. This unusual biography is accompanied by artwork that seems to embrace many mediums, including charcoal, oils, colored pencils, and even digital photography. The illustrations emphasize the poem and even complement the content. The art was created by the author and members of her family, a beautiful and heartwarming touch. Much of the art is abstract, depicting concepts like love and pain, while other images are more straightforward, such as a painted portrait of Jesus and an illustration of a temple. The poem features different names for Jesus as it relates the story of his life. (The reference section at the end of the book includes more than 40 names that he has been called in various cultures and religions.) The poem dives into some of the most well-known and iconic moments of Jesus’ life. The first part of the poem covers Jesus’ intentions to come to Earth to save humanity after Adam and Eve sinned as well as the savior’s birth to the Virgin Mary and his baptism. The next part discusses events from Jesus’ life, such as his multiplying loaves and fishes to feed the hungry, raising Lazarus from the dead, and healing the sick. Near the end, the poem turns somber as it portrays Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection and then uplifting as it explores the new church (“Individually humanity / Needs to accept / Isus Hristos, His Sacrifice, / His bodily Resurrection, and / The forgiveness of sin! / He is Savior, Lord, / Healer and Deliverer!”). Overall, the eclectic illustrations and Marianne Moessner Chen’s lucid, inspirational poem make for an absorbing and easy reading experience focusing on Jesus’ odyssey. Celebrating each part of his journey, the work is perfect for adults as well as children who are just learning about these concepts and events. The art only enhances the poem’s sentiments and lessons.
An engaging Christian poem with plenty of striking illustrations.Pub Date: June 29, 2022
ISBN: 9781039118577
Page Count: 60
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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