A gorgeous and personal tribute to Mandela’s legacy.
Zindzi Mandela tells her curious grandchildren Zazi and Ziwelene the story of their great-grandfather Nelson Mandela.
When Nelson Mandela’s great-grandchildren Zazi and Ziwelene find a photo of their great-grandfather, that sparks an honest discussion about apartheid and race relations in South Africa. Answering her grandchildren’s questions, Zindzi Mandela shares her experience as a child of apartheid, what her mother’s and father’s lives were like and how dedicated Mandela was to his people; “Grandad was fighting for us all to be equal.” In clear and emotional language, the authors discuss the history of apartheid and Mandela’s fight to end it, even while locked away in prison. One of the story’s central messages is the importance of living a life of service, as did Mandela, “a man who was able to forgive all the people who made him and his family and his people suffer.” Qualls’ pencil, collage, and acrylic illustrations are evocative; powerful spreads depict police brutality, incarceration, protest, segregation, and hope. Qualls showcases his command of color, emotion, and style on every page. Readers might come away from this informational book wanting better documentation of historical facts; there is no authors’ note or other backmatter. Nevertheless, this is a beautiful and inspiring reflection on Nelson Mandela’s life and his impact on the world.
A gorgeous and personal tribute to Mandela’s legacy. (Picture book/biography. 6-12)Pub Date: June 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78603-136-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
With young readers diagnosed with anxiety in ever increasing numbers, this book offers a necessary mirror to many.
Young Raina is 9 when she throws up for the first time that she remembers, due to a stomach bug. Even a year later, when she is in fifth grade, she fears getting sick.
Raina begins having regular stomachaches that keep her home from school. She worries about sharing food with her friends and eating certain kinds of foods, afraid of getting sick or food poisoning. Raina’s mother enrolls her in therapy. At first Raina isn’t sure about seeing a therapist, but over time she develops healthy coping mechanisms to deal with her stress and anxiety. Her therapist helps her learn to ground herself and relax, and in turn she teaches her classmates for a school project. Amping up the green, wavy lines to evoke Raina’s nausea, Telgemeier brilliantly produces extremely accurate visual representations of stress and anxiety. Thought bubbles surround Raina in some panels, crowding her with anxious “what if”s, while in others her negative self-talk appears to be literally crushing her. Even as she copes with anxiety disorder and what is eventually diagnosed as mild irritable bowel syndrome, she experiences the typical stresses of school life, going from cheer to panic in the blink of an eye. Raina is white, and her classmates are diverse; one best friend is Korean American.
With young readers diagnosed with anxiety in ever increasing numbers, this book offers a necessary mirror to many. (Graphic memoir. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-545-85251-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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