Edifying and worth the read despite some flaws of execution.
Yolanda Gladden was born in modest circumstances in Farmville, Virginia, in 1954, the same year the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court case ended school segregation in the U.S.
This third-person biography opens with an account of Gladden’s formative years, including happy times spent at her Uncle Tank’s convenience store, in church on Sundays, and watching her mother sew. In her close-knit community, young Yolanda learned important lessons of resilience and faith, and her family instilled pride in her. As she grew older, she “noticed the world around her was divided into two distinct colors: black and white.” By 1959, Yolanda was school-aged, but White lawmakers in her county still hadn’t implemented the federal mandate to integrate classrooms; rather, they had closed all schools. The rest of the book highlights the response of Farmville’s Black community, which included protests and the establishment of empowering grassroots schools for Black children. While the book shines a light on the so-called “Lost Generation,” a piece of U.S. history that many readers will be unfamiliar with, Gladden’s personal and emotional experience of the life-changing events gets lost in the largely fact-driven, outward-looking narrative. Morris’ collaged tissue paper and digital art is dynamic and excels at depicting multiple scenes per spread. Most characters are Black.
Edifying and worth the read despite some flaws of execution. (authors' notes, timeline, sources, further reading) (Picture book biography. 6-10)Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-301116-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era.
The New Orleans school child who famously broke the color line in 1960 while surrounded by federal marshals describes the early days of her experience from a 6-year-old’s perspective.
Bridges told her tale to younger children in 2009’s Ruby Bridges Goes to School, but here the sensibility is more personal, and the sometimes-shocking historical photos have been replaced by uplifting painted scenes. “I didn’t find out what being ‘the first’ really meant until the day I arrived at this new school,” she writes. Unfrightened by the crowd of “screaming white people” that greets her at the school’s door (she thinks it’s like Mardi Gras) but surprised to find herself the only child in her classroom, and even the entire building, she gradually realizes the significance of her act as (in Smith’s illustration) she compares a small personal photo to the all-White class photos posted on a bulletin board and sees the difference. As she reflects on her new understanding, symbolic scenes first depict other dark-skinned children marching into classes in her wake to friendly greetings from lighter-skinned classmates (“School is just school,” she sensibly concludes, “and kids are just kids”) and finally an image of the bright-eyed icon posed next to a soaring bridge of reconciliation. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era. (author and illustrator notes, glossary) (Autobiographical picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-75388-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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
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