paper 1-895688-87-6 Day uses the prehistoric tale of a young girl coming to terms with her fear of bears to explore the world of cave art. Quennu might be able to handle woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, but cave bears give her the willies. Her clan’s shaman gives her a bear tooth as a talisman to conquer her fear. On the day when the shaman summons all the people to the cave for an ecstatic painting ceremony, Quennu enters the cave after the others have gone on ahead. At one point she is sure she sees the fiery eyes of an enormous cave bear, yet she carries on, the tooth giving her strength. When she finds her clan in the shadowscape of a great chamber, they are singing and dancing and chanting and applying brushes to the cave walls. Quennu joins in, painting the bear, and putting to rest her fears of the creature, but not her respect for it. Day delivers charged, swirling color and smoky imagery in her illustrations, plus the frisson of transportive mystery that may turn children into future history majors. An explanatory page at the end puts the action into context. (Picture book. 7-11)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-895688-86-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Firefly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
PLB 0-06-027821-8 For Aliki (Marianthe’s Story, 1998, etc.), the story of the Globe Theatre is a tale of two men: Shakespeare, who made it famous, and Sam Wanamaker, the driving force behind its modern rebuilding. Decorating margins with verbal and floral garlands, Aliki creates a cascade of landscapes, crowd scenes, diminutive portraits, and sequential views, all done with her trademark warmth and delicacy of line, allowing viewers to glimpse Elizabethan life and theater, historical sites that still stand, and the raising of the new Globe near the ashes of the old. She finishes with a play list, and a generous helping of Shakespearean coinages. Though the level of information doesn’t reach that of Diane Stanley’s Bard of Avon (1992), this makes a serviceable introduction to Shakespeare’s times while creating a link between those times and the present; further tempt young readers for whom the play’s the thing with Marcia Williams’s Tales From Shakespeare (1998). (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-10)
Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-027820-X
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
Leedy (Measuring Penny, 1998, etc.), so deft in making hard facts memorable and setting information into a context that makes sense to children, selects a hodge-podge of details and miscellany to convey a sense of what every state is about, as either a political entity or a place. Into lively, effulgent illustrations she plants a monotonous, forgettable list of items to distinguish every state: a map, the state flower and bird, a whiff of landscape, a glimpse of industry. There’s little about such a list—e.g., wheat, pronghorn, western meadowlark, prairie rose, Sitting Bull—to shout, in that example, “North Dakota” to children. The alphabetical listing—Alaska through Wyoming, four states a spread, with room for the US territories and Washington, D.C.—will help researchers, although it necessarily separates states that have natural geographic or historic connections, such as Vermont and New Hampshire, or West Virginia and Virginia, divided during the Civil War. Readers gain a good, first-line resource, with all the enthusiasm Leedy has made her trademark, but without much chance that they’ll adopt the excitement. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8234-1431-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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