4Apr

Miguel’s Brave Knight

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Miguel’s Brave Knight is picture book biography in verse by the National Young People’s Poet Laureate, Margarita Engle. It tells the story of Miguel Cervantes, the sixteenth century writer, famous for Don Quixote.

Any picture book biography, but especially one in verse, has to be particular about what story it tells. A picture book doesn’t give you the length to delve into every aspect of a subject’s life. You need to choose one theme to explore and explain and describe. Someone once described it to me as finding the single golden thread that will run through every page of your manuscript. The demands of poetry make it even more important that the focus is tight and well-defined.

Engle explores the relationship between imagination and bravery in her book. The book is written in the voice of Cervantes as a boy. We see him struggling with his family’s economically precarious situation. When his father is thrown in debtor’s prison, young Cervantes says:

They even took our beds and plates.

Where will we sleep?

How will we eat?

This scary situation–one that will be familiar to, sadly, many children–requires real bravery. Engle explores where Cervantes’ courage to continue comes:

Our empty house looks

so spooky

and stark…

But when I close my eyes,

the spark of a story flares up.

This book is set in the 1500s, but it is a sympathetic acknowledgment of the kinds of family, home, and political traumas children face. And it gives them a model, suffused with hope, for how to deal with those problems, for how to find their own inner bravery.

Miguel’s Brave Knight: Young Cervantes and His Dream of Don Quixote, by Margarita Engle, illustrated by Raul Colon. (Peachtree: 2018).

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

Tags: 16th Century Peachtree poetry writers

5Oct

Seven and a Half Tons of Steel

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

1 Comment

Picture book readers are young. Very, very young. Their entire lives they’ve had a black president. They’ve never known a world without smart phones. September 11, 2001 is ancient history to them–it happened long, long before they were born.

So when you’re writing a nonfiction picture book, how do you provide context without making most of the book about what happened before the story started?

Vicky Nolan faces this problem in Seven and a Half Tons of Steel, the story of how a steel beam from the World Trade Center was melted down and became the bow of a ship. Her story is about what happened after that terrible day, but she can’t assume that her readers will come to the story with all of the personal memories that older readers have. She has to tell what happened without letting what happened on September 11 becoming the story.

It’s a tough problem, but one elegantly solved by using every page of the book to its fullest advantage. The endpapers show a boy with a baseball mitt walking under a cloudless blue sky. In one corner, high above him, is a jet.

The next spread shows a New York street, crowded with taxis, and we see the blur of a jet–startlingly close to the skyline–in the rearview mirror of one of the taxis.

The next spread is finally the title page. There, we see one of the Twin Towers against the blue sky, and we see the nose of the jet make first contact with the building.

Later in the book, Nolan shows us the next step in the progression–the blue sky overwhelmed by clouds of dust and rubble–and she reminds us that “Almost three thousand people lost their lives.” But most of the scaffolding for this story happens before the first words of the story. Almost immediately, we are plunged into the aftermath of the disaster, which is where the heart of her story lies.

This book is interesting to compare to The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. It solves the problem in the opposite way–it is thoroughly grounded in what happened before September 11, 2001 and only mentions the disaster at the end.

Thomas Gonzalez–the artist who drew 14 Cows for America–has created beautiful pastel and watercolor illustrations for the book.

Seven and a Half Tons of Steel by Janet Nolan, illustrated by Thomas Gonzalez. Peachtree: 2016.

Every week I participate in the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge at Kid Lit Frenzy.

Tags: Peachtree scaffolding

Annette Bay Pimentel

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Miguel’s Brave Knight

Seven and a Half Tons of Steel