Grounded in the events of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, this hybrid of fact and fiction is leavened by a guitar-picking hound dog’s blues-imbued narration. “This story begins with shoes. / This story is all for true. / This story walks. And walks. And walks. / To the blues.” The oppressive force of Jim Crow laws is evocatively personified both textually and visually. “…Jim Crow flew in waving his bony wings. …And on that day, it was Rosa Parks who got Jim Crow’s peck, peck, peck, right up close.” Brian Pinkney’s superb ink-on-board illustrations depict Jim Crow’s chiaroscuro menace: Gestural, wing-like shapes flail above tense cityscapes. The text conveys the grim determination of the 40,000 participants in the 13-month-long boycott, interweaving 1956’s landmark Supreme Court decision with segregation and Dr. King’s Montgomery speech on the night of Parks’s arrest. Parks’s preceding, years-long activism in civil-rights issues is unexamined in both text and author’s note, however, continuing an unfortunate silence shared with other treatments of the subject for young children. (author’s note, further resources) (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-082118-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORY
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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. 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Categories: CHILDREN'S BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CHILDREN'S HISTORY
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A 50th-anniversary commemoration of the epochal Apollo 11 mission.
Modeling her account on “The House That Jack Built” (an unspoken, appropriate nod to President John F. Kennedy’s foundational role in the enterprise), Greene takes Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins from liftoff to post-splashdown ticker-tape parade. Side notes on some spreads and two pages of further facts with photographs at the end, all in smaller type, fill in select details about the mission and its historical context. The rhymed lines are fully cumulated only once, so there is some repetition but never enough to grow monotonous: “This is the Moon, a mysterious place, / a desolate land in the darkness of space, / far from Earth with oceans blue.” Also, the presentation of the text in just three or fewer lines per spread stretches out the narrative and gives Brundage latitude for both formal and informal group portraits of Apollo 11’s all-white crew, multiple glimpses of our planet and the moon at various heights, and, near the end, atmospheric (so to speak) views of the abandoned lander and boot prints in the lunar dust.
It’s not the most dramatic version, but it’s a visually effective and serviceable addition to the rapidly growing shelf of tributes to our space program’s high-water mark. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-58536-412-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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