Lindbergh first recast Psalm 139 in simple, rhymed couplets in her anthology In Every Tiny Grain of Sand (2000). Here, Caldecott Honor Medalist Meade (Hush, 1996) expands the verse with watercolor and collage using geometric forms and color both matte and translucent to create satisfying, accessible images. In the frontispiece, a little girl peers down from her top bunk to see if her little brother, snuggled with his bear, is awake yet. The siblings (and the bear) proceed on a sunlit day to frolic with two friends, one a dark-skinned boy, the other a café-au-lait girl. They climb trees, build sandcastles, play in and by the lake, toast marshmallows, and at last turn in for the night, flashlight at the ready, in a tent outside. The text begins, “Lord, you look at me and know me, / Every step I take, you show me.” It continues through the sense of the psalm, “When I’m lonely, you are near, / When I’m angry, you stay here. / High as heaven bright, you greet me, / Down in darkness, too, you meet me.” The Divine as an all-caring presence is underscored in the structure of the pictures: no adults appear, but the activities, like boating and building a campfire, imply adult action in loving support and unobtrusive care. There is a certain heaviness to the beat of the couplet format, but that is mitigated somewhat by pictorial clarity and sincere reverence. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7636-1106-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This heavily earnest celebration of multi-ethnicity combines full-bleed paintings of smiling children, viewed through a golden haze dancing, playing, planting seedlings, and the like, with a hyperbolic, disconnected text—``Dark as leopard spots, light as sand,/Children buzz with laughter that kisses our land...''— printed in wavy lines. Literal-minded readers may have trouble with the author's premise, that ``Children come in all the colors of the earth and sky and sea'' (green? blue?), and most of the children here, though of diverse and mixed racial ancestry, wear shorts and T-shirts and seem to be about the same age. Hamanaka has chosen a worthy theme, but she develops it without the humor or imagination that animates her Screen of Frogs (1993). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11131-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
There’s always tomorrow.
A lyrical message of perseverance and optimism.
The text uses direct address, which the title- and final-page illustrations suggest comes from an adult voice, to offer inspiration and encouragement. The opening spreads reads, “Tonight as you sleep, a new day stirs. / Each kiss good night is a wish for tomorrow,” as the accompanying art depicts a child with black hair and light skin asleep in a bed that’s fantastically situated in a stylized landscape of buildings, overpasses, and roadways. The effect is dreamlike, in contrast with the next illustration, of a child of color walking through a field and blowing dandelion fluff at sunrise. Until the last spread, each child depicted in a range of settings is solitary. Some visual metaphors falter in terms of credibility, as in the case of a white-appearing child using a wheelchair in an Antarctic ice cave strewn with obstacles, as the text reads “you’ll explore the world, only feeling lost in your imagination.” Others are oblique in attempted connections between text and art. How does a picture of a pale-skinned, black-haired child on a bridge in the rain evoke “first moments that will dance with you”? But the image of a child with pink skin and brown hair scaling a wall as text reads “there will be injustice that will challenge you, and it will surprise you how brave you can be” is clearer.
There’s always tomorrow. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-99437-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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