An admiring, and admirable, tribute to an iconoclastic artist.
Anecdotes arranged, verselike, in three acts honor the enigmatic Edward Gorey (1925-2000): iconic artist, writer, voracious collector, and lover of cats.
Act One examines Edward’s precocious childhood: He drew at 18 months, taught himself to read at 3 and a half, and devoured Dracula just before turning 6. Whether creating his own books or walking through downtown Chicago barefoot, toenails painted green, Edward expressed his originality early. Act Two examines Gorey’s decades in New York City, where he illustrated others’ books and wrote his own indelibly unique tales. He attended the New York City Ballet’s productions religiously. His books, embodying his “deliciously sinister sense of humor,” gained a growing following. His sets and costume design for the Broadway production of Dracula yielded fame and a Tony. Gorey eschewed celebrity, however, using his earnings from the show to buy a house on Cape Cod. Act Three explores his time there, writing, drawing, tending his six cats, taking part in community theater productions, and prodigiously collecting books and objects ranging from teddy bears to skeletons. Burgess relishes Gorey’s contentment and celebrates his singular artistic achievements. “He lived his life precisely as he wished,” and his books’ strange denizens live on, “just as Edward imagined.” In playful, expressionistic tableaux, Majewski depicts cityscapes, book-stuffed interiors, vibrant stages, selected Gorey characters, and the seaside ease of his final years.
An admiring, and admirable, tribute to an iconoclastic artist. (author’s note, further reading, quotation citations, chronology, photograph, reproductions of Gorey’s work) (Picture-book biography. 5-9)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781984893802
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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Bridges Goes to School, but here the sensibility is more personal, and the sometimes-shocking historical photos have been replaced by uplifting painted scenes.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
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
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