A warm glimpse into the life and personality of a favorite childhood author.
Seeing that an upcoming class play needs sprucing up, a child takes matters into her own hands.
Looking back to her mother’s beginnings as a writer, Stemple offers a biographical tidbit that does double duty as tribute and as fresh encouragement for budding creative talents. Little Janie, she notes, eventually became the prolific, critically acclaimed children’s book author Jane Yolen. Living as she does in a world of great books, intriguing words, and imagined dramas, young Janie immediately realizes that the script for the school play in which she’s landed the role of “Girl Number 1” is going to be a “boring bust.” Time for a rewrite! The next morning she dances into school with a veggie-themed musical (starring herself as “chief carrot”) that goes on to earn a standing ovation. “It was Janie’s first rave review. It wouldn’t be her last.” Between endpapers featuring bookshelves crowded with just a sampling of familiar Yolen titles, Goodnight portrays a hardworking, confident child with an inward gaze. In some scenes, she’s surrounded by swirls of words or fanciful figures from books she would go on to write; in others, smiling adults offer support and fellow students diverse in skin tone gather round, eager to follow her lead. In the afterword, the author pairs a set of black-and-white snapshots with more detail about her talented mother and family.
A warm glimpse into the life and personality of a favorite childhood author. (Picture-book biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781623543273
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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