A visual paean to Hughes’s enduring poem, Lewis’s images make a personal connection to a taproot of feelings. The 12 lines of the poem, considered Hughes’s signature song of the Harlem Renaissance, are poignantly expressed through the artist’s trademark watercolors, which depict in successive double-page spreads black children playing by the Euphrates, a mother and child sleeping by the Congo and fishermen with a net waist-deep in the Nile. The penultimate image, also depicted on the cover, brings the poem into the present with a grandfather and child fishing by a modern Mississippi River bridge. Lewis states in a concluding note that he nearly drowned as a child, and his paintings are awash with emotion. While the picture-book format targets the book for young readers, the word “Negro” in the title may require some context. It has the capacity to reach far above the normal picture-book ages, however, and should be considered for older collections. The beautifully reverent, serene cover image will persuade all to look inside. (Picture book. 5 & up)
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7868-1867-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Disney-Jump at the Sun
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
Don’t let anyone miss this.
Count on award-winning Woodson (Visiting Day, p. 1403, etc.) to present readers with a moving, lyrical, and completely convincing novel in verse.
Eleven-year-old Lonnie (“Locomotion”) starts his poem book for school by getting it all down fast: “This whole book’s a poem ’cause every time I try to / tell the whole story my mind goes Be quiet! / Only it’s not my mind’s voice, / it’s Miss Edna’s over and over and over / Be quiet! . . . So this whole book’s a poem because poetry’s short and / this whole book’s a poem ’cause Ms. Marcus says / write it down before it leaves your brain.” Lonnie tells readers more, little by little, about his foster mother Miss Edna, his teacher Ms. Marcus, his classmates, and the fire that killed his parents and separated him from his sister. Slowly, his gift for observing people and writing it down lets him start to love new people again, and to widen his world from the nugget of tragedy that it was. Woodson nails Lonnie’s voice from the start, and lets him express himself through images and thoughts that vibrate in the different kinds of lines he puts down. He tends to free verse, but is sometimes assigned a certain form by Ms. Marcus. (“Today’s a bad day / Is that haiku? Do I look / like I even care?”) As in her prose novels, Woodson’s created a character whose presence you can feel like they were sitting next to you. And with this first novel-in-verse for her, Lonnie will sit by many readers and teach them to see like he does, “This day is already putting all kinds of words / in your head / and breaking them up into lines / and making the lines into pictures in your mind.”
Don’t let anyone miss this. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-23115-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
Brooks’s gloriously universal celebration of African-American childhood here receives a respectful and joyous treatment from one of the pre-eminent illustrators of the same. Readers coming to “Narcissa,” “Beulah at Church” and “Marie Lucille” for the first time will discover them accompanied by Ringgold’s trademark folk-art interpretations, the expressive brown figures depicted for the most part as vignettes against bright backgrounds. They show a Bronzeville that bustles with activity, single-family homes sharing the streets with apartment buildings and the occasional vacant lot. The children run, braids and arms out straight, and contemplate in turns, their exuberance tempered by the solemnity of childhood. While it’s regrettable that occasionally the specificity of the illustration robs a verse of its universality—the “special place” referenced in “Keziah” is shown to be underneath the kitchen table, for instance—the overall ebullience of the images more than compensates. There is a drop of truth in every single playful, piercing stanza, and anything that brings these poems to a new audience is to be cheered; a lovely package indeed. (Picture book/poetry. 7+)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-029505-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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