Extraordinary and wonderful.
What was essential about one golden-haired boy in love with flying becomes visible in Sís’ richly visual biographical portrait of French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Sís covers the basics: Saint-Exupéry briefly studied architecture, then was a pioneer air mail pilot and began to publish his stories. Assigned to the mail station at Cape Juby in the Spanish Sahara, “he loved the solitude and being under millions of stars.” He spent two of the war years exiled in New York and finally returned to fly for France. Sís’ work invites readers to take time, to attend to the narrative in both the straightforward text and the nuanced, complex pictures. Antoine’s pilot friend Guillaumet advises him “to follow the face of the landscape”: A small plane flies over faces in the dunes (perhaps a nod to Saint-Exupéry’s Terres des Hommes). A desert fox greets one of Antoine’s several crashes, but instead of direct speculation about Saint-Exupéry’s inspiration for The Little Prince, Sís offers a multifaceted look at the author as adventurer and dreamer. Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the sea near Corsica in 1944: In Sís’ poignant illustration, the lines of the Lockheed P-38 become the wings and bicycle of a flying machine, a little like one Antoine made as a child.
Extraordinary and wonderful. (Picture book/biography. 6-12)Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-38069-4
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
A picture book worth reading about a historical figure worth remembering.
An honestly told biography of an important politician whose name every American should know.
Published while the United States has its first African-American president, this story of John Roy Lynch, the first African-American speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, lays bare the long and arduous path black Americans have walked to obtain equality. The title’s first three words—“The Amazing Age”—emphasize how many more freedoms African-Americans had during Reconstruction than for decades afterward. Barton and Tate do not shy away from honest depictions of slavery, floggings, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, or the various means of intimidation that whites employed to prevent blacks from voting and living lives equal to those of whites. Like President Barack Obama, Lynch was of biracial descent; born to an enslaved mother and an Irish father, he did not know hard labor until his slave mistress asked him a question that he answered honestly. Freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, Lynch had a long and varied career that points to his resilience and perseverance. Tate’s bright watercolor illustrations often belie the harshness of what takes place within them; though this sometimes creates a visual conflict, it may also make the book more palatable for young readers unaware of the violence African-Americans have suffered than fully graphic images would. A historical note, timeline, author’s and illustrator’s notes, bibliography and map are appended.
A picture book worth reading about a historical figure worth remembering. (Picture book biography. 7-10)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8028-5379-0
Page Count: 50
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
The whimsy is slight—the story is not—and both its interest and its vocabulary are for the youngest members of this age...
Beverly Cleary has written all kinds of books (the most successful ones about the irrepressible Henry Huggins) but this is her first fantasy.
Actually it's plain clothes fantasy grounded in the everyday—except for the original conceit of a mouse who can talk and ride a motorcycle. A toy motorcycle, which belongs to Keith, a youngster, who comes to the hotel where Ralph lives with his family; Ralph and Keith become friends, Keith gives him a peanut butter sandwich, but finally Ralph loses the motorcycle—it goes out with the dirty linen. Both feel dreadfully; it was their favorite toy; but after Keith gets sick, and Ralph manages to find an aspirin for him in a nearby room, and the motorcycle is returned, it is left with Ralph....
The whimsy is slight—the story is not—and both its interest and its vocabulary are for the youngest members of this age group. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1965
ISBN: 0380709244
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1965
BOOK TO SCREEN
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