Thoughtful and evocative, this book will bring a score of new readers to Carroll’s impressive work.
Tumble down the rabbit hole into a wonderland filled with rhymes and whimsical wordplay.
In their first collaboration together, Krull and Sardá produce a delightful confection that is part Lewis Carroll biography and part word game. This charming picture book combines the nonsense words and phrases that became his trademark and names from his famous books about Alice to bring readers on a guided tour of Carroll’s madcap yet irresistible fantasy world. Along the way, readers learn the story of Carroll’s childhood and his meeting with the Liddell family that produced the books that made him a household name. The witty prose is aided and abetted by Sardá’s illustrations, which breathe new life into the infamous characters from Carroll’s life and Alice’s adventures. The illustrator’s double-page spreads are a wonderland in and of themselves, a riot of color that grounds the figures in the real world while also rendering them fantastical. The world created by the text and illustrations is tantalizing yet off-putting; it perfectly re-creates what Wonderland is meant to be, and the human figures in the pictures are, appropriately, both beautiful and slightly creepy. Krull refers to her subject as “Lewis” in the body of the text, not revealing Charles Dodgson’s real name until a closing note.
Thoughtful and evocative, this book will bring a score of new readers to Carroll’s impressive work. (glossary, sources) (Picture book/biography. 3-7)Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-34823-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
A memorable life—a forgettable presentation.
Baseball’s No. 42 strikes out.
Even as a babe in his mother’s arms, Robinson is depicted wearing his Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap in this latest entry in the Ordinary People Change the World series. He narrates his childhood alongside cartoon panels that show him as an expert runner and thrower. Racism and poverty are also part of his growing up, along with lessons in sharing and courage. Incredibly, the Negro Leagues are not mentioned beyond a passing reference to “a black team” with a picture of the Kansas City Monarchs next to their team bus (still looking like a child in the illustration, Robinson whines, “Gross! Is this food or goo?”). In 1946, Branch Rickey signs him to play for the Dodgers’ farm team, and the rest, as they say, is history. Robinson concludes his story with an exhortation to readers to be brave, strong and use their “power to do what’s right. / Use that power for a cause that you believe in.” Meltzer writes his inspirational biography as a first-person narrative, which risks being construed and used as an autobiography—which it is not. The digitally rendered cartoon illustrations that show Robinson as a perpetual child fall sadly short of capturing his demeanor and prowess.
A memorable life—a forgettable presentation. (photographs, timeline, sources, further reading) (Picture book/biography. 3-6)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8037-4086-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Skip.
The ever-popular pioneering female pilot gets a breezy and very incomplete biography.
Meltzer gives Amelia a first-person voice and, in a very sketchy narrative laced with comic-book speech bubbles, presents her as a dare-devil tomboy. The flying bug hits her when she goes up for a flight with Frank Hawks at the age of 23. She tries her hand at different jobs to earn money for flying lessons; Meltzer, writing too glibly, calls stenography, one of those failed efforts, a “fancy-schmancy word.” As Amelia makes her solo trans-Atlantic flight, she shouts, “This is AWESOME!”—a word no doubt intended to resonate with contemporary readers but unlikely to have occurred to Earhart at the moment. The text concludes with an exhortation to “Never let anyone stop you. / Whatever your dream is, chase it. / Work hard for it.” There is nary a mention of her final, disastrous around-the-world flight and disappearance over the Pacific. Eliopoulos’ digitally rendered art is cartoon in style, with Earhart resembling a bobblehead doll and wearing an aviator hat and goggles. The audience for this mixed-up comic/bio is not at all clear. Given its incomplete information and lack of source material (an actual quote from Earhart is unreferenced), there is no justifying calling it a biography. Nor is there enough entertainment to call this a comic book.
Skip. (photographs) (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8037-4082-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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