An inspiring glimpse into the talent and drive of a woman who marched to the beat of a different drummer.
A profile of groundbreaking 19th-century French animalier Rosa Bonheur.
Sanderson, herself a realistic painter whose initial artistic inspiration was horses, crafts an engaging biography whose dramatic oil compositions and engrossing narrative will pull in other equine aficionados. Peppering the text with horse imagery (Rosa “galloped into the world” and was sent “trotting back home” for being naughty at boarding school), Sanderson describes how Bonheur (1822-1899) was introduced to art as a child by her artist father who took her under his tutelage. At school, she “covered her papers with animal sketches,” and as a teenager, she trained at the Louvre; Bonheur went on to study horse anatomy at a medical school and horse musculature at a slaughterhouse. Sanderson explains the period’s limitations on women’s ambitions and its expectations regarding marriage—something headstrong Bonheur had “no interest in.” Thus, it is impressive that her paintings were shown at the Paris Salon annual exhibition, where she won a gold medal. It was her masterpiece, The Horse Fair, however—at 8 feet tall by 16 ½ feet wide—that garnered international attention and the most critical praise. Sanderson details the various steps in executing a work of this scale; the illustrations depict the painting studies, red ochre outlines and layering, and Bonheur on a ladder adding personality to each horse. Sanderson states that Bonheur was aided by her “companion” Nathalie. The extensive backmatter includes information about Bonheur’s lesbian identity.
An inspiring glimpse into the talent and drive of a woman who marched to the beat of a different drummer. (author’s note, bibliography, resources, sources, image credits) (Picture-book biography. 6-9)Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62371-848-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Crocodile/Interlink
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Energetic enough to carry younger rocketeers off the launch pad if not into a very high orbit.
The bubble-helmeted feline explains what rockets do and the role they have played in sending people (and animals) into space.
Addressing a somewhat younger audience than in previous outings (Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, 2013, etc.), Astro Cat dispenses with all but a light shower of “factoroids” to describe how rockets work. A highly selective “History of Space Travel” follows—beginning with a crew of fruit flies sent aloft in 1947, later the dog Laika (her dismal fate left unmentioned), and the human Yuri Gagarin. Then it’s on to Apollo 11 in 1969; the space shuttles Discovery, Columbia, and Challenger (the fates of the latter two likewise elided); the promise of NASA’s next-gen Orion and the Space Launch System; and finally vague closing references to other rockets in the works for local tourism and, eventually, interstellar travel. In the illustrations the spacesuited professor, joined by a mouse and cat in similar dress, do little except float in space and point at things. Still, the art has a stylish retro look, and portraits of Sally Ride and Guion Bluford diversify an otherwise all-white, all-male astronaut corps posing heroically or riding blocky, geometric spacecraft across starry reaches.
Energetic enough to carry younger rocketeers off the launch pad if not into a very high orbit. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-911171-55-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Flying Eye Books
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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