Bags up a worthy takeaway about finding beauty in the most unlikely of places.
A tribute to a New York City sanitation worker who salvaged a museum’s worth of treasures from the trash.
Though actual glimpses of the thousands of antique toys, old family portraits, and other evocative artifacts that Nelson Molina gathered over the course of his long career are limited to a paltry few photos at the end, his message that our castoff junk is rich in things that can be usefully recycled or upcycled comes through strongly in this brief biographical account. Following an appeal from Molina himself to search for the beauty and value in everything, even garbage, Larsen looks back to his subject’s youth in East Harlem. The author links the pleasure that Molina took in building birdhouses from discarded bits of lumber and repairing a broken toy truck for his little brother to later years on the job—arranging reclaimed items first in a locker room and then expanding into larger quarters as the first few finds grew into thousands. Vidal’s tidy, pleasant scenes of Molina hauling trash and sifting through garbage are implausibly clean and uncrowded. Still, suggestions for personal ways to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rethink” at the end invite readers to carry on the good work. Molina writes that his parents were from Puerto Rico; figures in group scenes are racially diverse.
Bags up a worthy takeaway about finding beauty in the most unlikely of places. (Picture-book biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781728283517
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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Bridges Goes to School, but here the sensibility is more personal, and the sometimes-shocking historical photos have been replaced by uplifting painted scenes.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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