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8Apr

Dream Builder

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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Cover of book shows African American man in foreground, Museum of African American History and Culture in backgroun

What does it take to build a dream? Kelly Starling Lyons’ picture book biography Dream Builder: The Story of Architect Philip Freelon explores that question.

Lyons structures Dream Builder around the steps necessary to build a building. She explores Vision, Foundation, Frame, Form, and Dream. We see how each of these ideas led to Freelon becoming an architect. At the same time, we see how each of these ideas leads to the buildings he creates.

The story also explores Freelon’s learning disability. He had many strengths in school. But reading was difficult for him. I think kids with similar struggles will love this book.

I was also interested to learn about Freelon’s attitudes about what he was willing to design. The book explains that “He will not design prisons or casinos.”

Freelon himself wrote an afterword for the book just weeks before he passed away in 2019. And Lyons has an interesting author’s note about how she came to the project.

You can read about Kelly Starling Lyons here.

You can look at more of the illustrator’s art here.

Dream Builder: The Story of Architect Philip Freelon by Kelly Starling Lyons, illustrated by Laura Freeman (Lee & Low: 2020).

Image shows a tree growing from a book and reads Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge 2020

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10Oct

Silent Star

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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Cover of book looks like an old-time baseball card, with a portrait of William Hoy in the center.Silent Star is a picture book biography of William Hoy, a professional baseball player in the late nineteenth century who flourished in his career despite his inability to hear.

The book starts with a lively description of one of Hoy’s record-breaking games and then goes back to the scene, when Hoy was three years old, when an illness left him with hearing impairment. We follow him through his growing-up years, both at home and at a special school for the deaf. He played baseball well in school but people assumed his disability would keep him from playing pro ball.

Always deliberate and hard-working, Hoy became a cobbler. He built a baseball diamond behind his shop, encouraging boys to play ball there. It was on that field, when he was playing with the boys, that he was discovered by a talent scout and hired on to a baseball team.

The book follows his career and concludes with where his career took him after he left professional baseball. I was left impressed by his perseverance, his talent, and his ability for hard work.

This book has a hefty word count–2518 words!–but the book design has been carefully thought out to keep the pages from feeling too word-heavy. The text on most pages is placed in a box made to look like an old-timey notepad.

Open book shows text set off as if it were written on an old time notepad.

It was especially interesting to read this book after I’d read Nancy Churnin’s recent book, The William Hoy Story. The books take different approaches to his life, focusing on different aspects of his career. The art in the two books underlines the differences. They’d be a great pair to look at together, thinking about why each author made the choices they did.

Lee and Low has an interview with the author posted on their website.

Silent Star: The Story of Deaf Major Leaguer William Hoy, by Bill Wise, illustrated by Adam Gustavson. Lee and Low: 2018.

Picture of children surrounding a globe

Alyson Beecher hosts the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge at kidlitfrenzy.com. Visit there for more great nonfiction picture books!

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18Oct

Martí’s Song for Freedom

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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Cover of Martí's Song for Freedom shows Jose Marti in front of the Cuban flagJosé Martí was an activist for Cuban independence in the late nineteenth century, but because of his political activities in Cuba, he was exiled. He ended up spending many years in the United States. Martí’s Song for Freedom tells the story of his life but also captures that duality of his movement between Cuba and the United States by including all the text in both English and Spanish on the same page. Almost every page includes excerpts (in both English and Spanish) from his poems:

I come from every place,

And I’m on the road to everywhere

Yo vengo de todas partes

Y hacia todas partes voy

One of the challenges of a bilingual text is the sheer amount of writing that needs to find a place on every spread. This book is carefully designed to solve that problem; every page has text on the left side, the first column in English, the second in Spanish, and a full-page illustration on the facing page.Spread from book shows text on one side, illustration on facing page.

The back matter is also in both languages, and includes, on one page, all of the excerpts (in both languages) in the book.

I loved learning about a freedom fighter that I only knew about vaguely, and I loved having both languages available to me.

Martí’s Song for Freedom/ Martí y sus versos por la libertad, by Emma Otheguy, illustrated by Beatriz Vidal. Children’s Book Press: 2017.

Children with book around a globe

I participate every Wednesday in the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge at Kid Lit Frenzy.

 

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17Aug

Prairie Dog Song

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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Cover of book showing prairie dogs peeking out of their burrowsElementary school children learn about living webs–that plants and animals interact with each other within an environment. There are some great books depicting ecosystem webs–High Tide for Horseshoe Crabs looks at the interactions of animals around Delaware Bay, No Monkeys, No Chocolate examines the interactions of animals and plants in the rain forest, Tree of Wonder explores all the life in a single tree. Prairie Dog Song follows in this tradition.

Prairie Dog Song looks at how plants and animals interacted to build the great American prairies and then what happened when those relationships were disrupted by farmers and ranchers. In a singsong cadence, we hear how “the grass turned to desert land.” The book ends hopefully, though, showing how keeping a “keystone species” like prairie dogs intact also keeps other parts of the ecosystem healthy. The text chants, “in one place lived prairie dogs,…and the grasses waved all around.”

The main part of the text can be sung as a cumulative song, based on an old tune titled “The Green Grass Grows All Around,” (music included in the back matter), but my favorite part of the book was the wonderful explanatory text on every spread. It gives rich detail about the science behind the page and also about scientists who have worked with prairie species.

The art on every page is collage. It reminds me a lot of Susan Roth’s previous work on Parrots over Puerto Rico. Her technique is especially successful when she’s depicting animals within a landscape, but even the collages with people in them have charm.

The great back matter for the book includes not just the music for the song but also “More Prairie Dog Facts,” a “Timeline of the Janos Grasslands,” a “Glossary and Pronunciation Guide,” a bibliography (with over 30 sources!), and my favorite–photographs of the animals, landscapes, and scientists depicted in the book.

Prairie Dog Song by Susan L. Roth and Cindy Trumbore. Lee and Low: 2016

Children around a globe.

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5May

The Mangrove Tree: Planting Trees to Feed Families

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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rothThis inspiring book works at lots of different levels for lots of different readers. First, it’s a simple cumulative story for preschoolers, like “This is the house that Jack Built”:

“This is the tree, a mangrove tree.

These are the trees, mangrove trees, that were planted by the sea.”

And so on, we hear the story of mangrove trees being planted to reclaim marginal land.

This first, simple level, works as a read-aloud. But the authors also include on every page a sidebar that tells in more detail about the initiative to reclaim land in Eritrea to fight against famine. Parents and older kids would gobble up these details.

And finally, the back matter (8 pages of text and photos!) tells the story of the American scientist, Gordon Sato, who dreamt up the idea of relieving hunger by planting these trees and about how his experiences in an internment camp during World War II led to this idea. I felt inspired and uplifted by his vision and his tenacity.

The Mangrove Tree: Planting Trees to Feed Families, by Susan L. Roth and Cindy Trumbore. Lee & Low: 2011.

 

 

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