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
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
A picture book more than worthy of sharing the shelf with Alan Schroeder and Jerry Pinkney’s Minty (1996) and Carole Boston...
A memorable, lyrical reverse-chronological walk through the life of an American icon.
In free verse, Cline-Ransome narrates the life of Harriet Tubman, starting and ending with a train ride Tubman takes as an old woman. “But before wrinkles formed / and her eyes failed,” Tubman could walk tirelessly under a starlit sky. Cline-Ransome then describes the array of roles Tubman played throughout her life, including suffragist, abolitionist, Union spy, and conductor on the Underground Railroad. By framing the story around a literal train ride, the Ransomes juxtapose the privilege of traveling by rail against Harriet’s earlier modes of travel, when she repeatedly ran for her life. Racism still abounds, however, for she rides in a segregated train. While the text introduces readers to the details of Tubman’s life, Ransome’s use of watercolor—such a striking departure from his oil illustrations in many of his other picture books—reveals Tubman’s humanity, determination, drive, and hope. Ransome’s lavishly detailed and expansive double-page spreads situate young readers in each time and place as the text takes them further into the past.
A picture book more than worthy of sharing the shelf with Alan Schroeder and Jerry Pinkney’s Minty (1996) and Carole Boston Weatherford and Kadir Nelson’s Moses (2006). (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2047-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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