In 1916, ten-year-old Aileen Rogers sent her father, a medic in the trenches of Belgium, her own small teddy bear as a Christmas gift. Lt. Rogers put the bear in his uniform pocket—where it was discovered after his death at the battle of Passchendaele. Fellow soldiers shipped Teddy home along with Rogers’s medals, uniforms and letters; they now make up a permanent exhibit in the Canadian War Museum (co-author Innes is Aileen Rogers’s granddaughter). Told simply and effectively from Teddy’s point of view, the narration focuses on the Rogers family’s life before the war and the loneliness they felt when separated from each other. The design interposes Deines’s soft-edged illustrations with actual artifacts belonging to the Rogers family (photographs, report cards, Circumstances of Death Report). He brings both a sense of intimacy (Aileen’s hands putting Teddy in a box) and universality (an iconic soldier vanishing in a field of poppies) to the text. A lovely book, of special interest to Canadians. (epilogue) (Picture book. 5-10)
Pub Date: April 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55470-097-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: KPk/Key Porter Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors of Fatty Legs (2010) distill that moving memoir of an Inuit child’s residential school experience into an even more powerful picture book.
“Brave, clever, and as unyielding” as the sharpening stone for which she’s named, Olemaun convinces her father to send her from their far-north village to the “outsiders’ school.” There, the 8-year-old receives particularly vicious treatment from one of the nuns, who cuts her hair, assigns her endless chores, locks her in a dark basement and gives her ugly red socks that make her the object of other children’s taunts. In her first-person narration, she compares the nun to the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, a story she has heard from her sister and longs to read for herself, subtly reminding readers of the power of literature to help face real life. Grimard portrays this black-cloaked nun with a scowl and a hooked nose, the image of a witch. Her paintings stretch across the gutter and sometimes fill the spreads. Varying perspectives and angles, she brings readers into this unfamiliar world. Opening with a spread showing the child’s home in a vast, frozen landscape, she proceeds to hone in on the painful school details. A final spread shows the triumphant child and her book: “[N]ow I could read.”
Utterly compelling. (Picture book/memoir. 5-9)Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55451-490-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORY
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Shamir offers an investigation of the foundations of freedoms in the United States via its founding documents, as well as movements and individuals who had great impacts on shaping and reshaping those institutions.
The opening pages of this picture book get off to a wobbly start with comments such as “You know that feeling you get…when you see a wide open field that you can run through without worrying about traffic or cars? That’s freedom.” But as the book progresses, Shamir slowly steadies the craft toward that wide-open field of freedom. She notes the many obvious-to-us-now exclusivities that the founding political documents embodied—that the entitled, white, male authors did not extend freedom to enslaved African-Americans, Native Americans, and women—and encourages readers to learn to exercise vigilance and foresight. The gradual inclusion of these left-behind people paints a modestly rosy picture of their circumstances today, and the text seems to give up on explaining how Native Americans continue to be left behind. Still, a vital part of what makes freedom daunting is its constant motion, and that is ably expressed. Numerous boxed tidbits give substance to the bigger political picture. Who were the abolitionists and the suffragists, what were the Montgomery bus boycott and the “Uprising of 20,000”? Faulkner’s artwork conveys settings and emotions quite well, and his drawing of Ruby Bridges is about as darling as it gets. A helpful timeline and bibliography appear as endnotes.
A reasonably solid grounding in constitutional rights, their flexibility, lacunae, and hard-won corrections, despite a few misfires. (Informational picture book. 6-10)Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-54728-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL SCIENCES
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