Flowing watercolors and charming rhymes in English and Spanish combine to convey the colors of the natural world with simple yet sophisticated grace. For the word “Blue” (written in that color) Luján writes: “It’s all in the sky, / except for those flowers / and that little girl’s eyes.” He repeats the verse in Spanish, sometimes with slightly different words: “El Azul / está todo arriba, / salvo en unas flores / y en los ojos de una niña.” An impressionistic blue wash, dotted with stalks of grass and wildflowers, depicts a little girl in a blue dress with a brown antelope beside a blue pool. This same antelope dances across many of the pages, which often also include birds, fish, flowers and trees in various colors. The imagery in both words and pictures is often richly original: “Into a tiny seed / fits clover, fits a tree, / fits the whole jungle . . . fits green.” A lovely book to share, reflect upon and linger over. (Picture book. 3-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-88899-863-7
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY
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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. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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