Speaks to all children with music in their heads while introducing an unjustly little-known pioneer.
A small girl gets a big guitar…and the rest is history.
Pinkney Barlow, third generation of the renowned and artistic Pinkney clan, offers a tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Godmother of Rock and Roll,” in swinging words and paper collage scenes featuring a child eagerly absorbing the love and harmonies of her African American community. Having listened to Momma strum a mandolin and danced to music each week with others in her hometown of Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Little Rosetta is thrilled to get a guitar of her very own and is determined to learn how to play it in time for next summer’s church anniversary. She carries it everywhere, listening to the sounds of her town, plucking the strings until her fingers are raw—and, when the time comes, letting loose with pure notes that “poured over the crowd like summer rain washing the dust off a new day.” Angled visual elements and occasional curved lines of narrative give a lively sense of musicality to the presentation, with lengths of actual string on the guitar and unglued paper edges around the dark-skinned human figures to add texture and dimension. Tonya Bolden and R. Gregory Christie take a longer look at Tharpe’s subsequent 50-year career in Rock, Rosetta, Rock! Roll, Rosetta, Roll! (2022), but both of these picture books offer high-stepping views of a child who taught herself how to make a new kind of music, one that “held the story of her people.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Speaks to all children with music in their heads while introducing an unjustly little-known pioneer. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-57106-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses.
An NBA star pays tribute to the influence of his grandfather.
In the same vein as his Long Shot (2009), illustrated by Frank Morrison, this latest from Paul prioritizes values and character: “My granddad Papa Chilly had dreams that came true,” he writes, “so maybe if I listen and watch him, / mine will too.” So it is that the wide-eyed Black child in the simply drawn illustrations rises early to get to the playground hoops before anyone else, watches his elder working hard and respecting others, hears him cheering along with the rest of the family from the stands during games, and recalls in a prose afterword that his grandfather wasn’t one to lecture but taught by example. Paul mentions in both the text and the backmatter that Papa Chilly was the first African American to own a service station in North Carolina (his presumed dream) but not that he was killed in a robbery, which has the effect of keeping the overall tone positive and the instructional content one-dimensional. Figures in the pictures are mostly dark-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81003-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Blandly laudatory.
The iconic animator introduces young readers to each “happy place” in his life.
The tally begins with his childhood home in Marceline, Missouri, and climaxes with Disneyland (carefully designed to be “the happiest place on Earth”), but the account really centers on finding his true happy place, not on a map but in drawing. In sketching out his early flubs and later rocket to the top, the fictive narrator gives Ub Iwerks and other Disney studio workers a nod (leaving his labor disputes with them unmentioned) and squeezes in quick references to his animated films, from Steamboat Willie to Winnie the Pooh (sans Fantasia and Song of the South). Eliopoulos incorporates stills from the films into his cartoon illustrations and, characteristically for this series, depicts Disney as a caricature, trademark mustache in place on outsized head even in childhood years and child sized even as an adult. Human figures default to white, with occasional people of color in crowd scenes and (ahistorically) in the animation studio. One unidentified animator builds up the role-modeling with an observation that Walt and Mickey were really the same (“Both fearless; both resourceful”). An assertion toward the end—“So when do you stop being a child? When you stop dreaming”—muddles the overall follow-your-bliss message. A timeline to the EPCOT Center’s 1982 opening offers photos of the man with select associates, rodent and otherwise. An additional series entry, I Am Marie Curie, publishes simultaneously, featuring a gowned, toddler-sized version of the groundbreaking physicist accepting her two Nobel prizes.
Blandly laudatory. (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2875-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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