Stone delivers a winner.
The surprisingly complex history of one of America’s favorite board games.
In the early 1900s, Lizzie Magie created and patented the Landlord’s Game in order to demonstrate the frequent injustices of the landlord-tenant relationship—it even had socialist alternative rules. As people began to play the game, it was adapted by players, including a business professor who called the game Monopoly. During the Great Depression, a down-on-his-luck businessman named Charles Darrow decided to handcraft and sell Monopoly boards, adding many of the design features we know today. As the success of Darrow’s version of Monopoly grew, Parker Brothers took interest—only to discover that they couldn’t patent it, as Lizzie Magie already had! When Parker Brothers finally gained rights to the game in 1935, Magie received relatively little compensation while Darrow made a small fortune. Stone presents the board game’s messy history with ease, providing a clear, linear path to today’s Monopoly without ever compromising the nuances of its invention. Direct-address narration engages children, leaving room for them to draw their own conclusions: “So who wins in this story? What do you think?” Salerno’s soft, dynamic full-bleed illustrations reflect yet move beyond the aesthetics of the game and time period, making every page compelling and fresh. All illustrated people, including named figures and background characters, appear white. Backmatter includes trivia, Monopoly-related math problems, an author’s note, and a bibliography.
Stone delivers a winner. (Informational picture book. 5-10)Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-168-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A reasonably solid grounding in constitutional rights, their flexibility, lacunae, and hard-won corrections, despite a few...
Shamir offers an investigation of the foundations of freedoms in the United States via its founding documents, as well as movements and individuals who had great impacts on shaping and reshaping those institutions.
The opening pages of this picture book get off to a wobbly start with comments such as “You know that feeling you get…when you see a wide open field that you can run through without worrying about traffic or cars? That’s freedom.” But as the book progresses, Shamir slowly steadies the craft toward that wide-open field of freedom. She notes the many obvious-to-us-now exclusivities that the founding political documents embodied—that the entitled, white, male authors did not extend freedom to enslaved African-Americans, Native Americans, and women—and encourages readers to learn to exercise vigilance and foresight. The gradual inclusion of these left-behind people paints a modestly rosy picture of their circumstances today, and the text seems to give up on explaining how Native Americans continue to be left behind. Still, a vital part of what makes freedom daunting is its constant motion, and that is ably expressed. Numerous boxed tidbits give substance to the bigger political picture. Who were the abolitionists and the suffragists, what were the Montgomery bus boycott and the “Uprising of 20,000”? Faulkner’s artwork conveys settings and emotions quite well, and his drawing of Ruby Bridges is about as darling as it gets. A helpful timeline and bibliography appear as endnotes.
A reasonably solid grounding in constitutional rights, their flexibility, lacunae, and hard-won corrections, despite a few misfires. (Informational picture book. 6-10)Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-54728-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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