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14Feb

2017 Nonfiction Picture Books I’m Just Now Reading

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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I’m still scrambling to catch up with 2017 books (though maybe that will give my library time to get a few 2018 titles in…). Here are three 2017 nonfiction picture books I’m just now reading. All three titles have beautiful art depicting nighttime scenes:

Cover of book shows boy dressed as an ancient Egyptian on a reed boat, as a grown-up paddles.

Nile Crossing is a surprising first-day-of-school book. The main character, Khepri, is nervous about leaving Mom and Dad behind, and worried about the new activities he’ll have to get used to. But he’s a child in ancient Egypt instead of the next town over, and he has to leave home before dawn in order to cross the Nile to get to school. The beautiful art is inspired by ancient Egyptian art. The back matter actually continues the story–we get to see Khepri make his first friend!–and watch him write his first letter. I’ve never before seen a sequel embedded in back matter, and I can only imagine how delighted Egypt-crazy kids will be to discover that the story continues. The back matter also has a fascinating essay about why it’s likely that lower-class boys and some girls attended school in ancient Egypt. In the Author’s Note, the author talks about how she got interested in the topic, and in her analogous note the illustrator talks about the process of illustrating a story from long ago.

Nile Crossing by Katy Beebe, illustrated by Sally Wern Comport. (Eerdmans: 2017).

 

 

Cover of book shows a boy--Vincent Van Gogh--asleep under a starry sky

 

 

Vincent Can’t Sleep is a lyrical picture book biography of Vincent Van Gogh. It’s structured around the refrain, “Vincent can’t sleep…” We follow Vincent throughout his life, seeing his wakefulness and attentiveness as a child, as a young person, and as an adult, lead to careful observation of the world around him. The scenes are biographical, placing Vincent where he actually lived at different stages of his life–“while the sturdy Dutch village of Zundert slumbers, he lies rocking in his wooden cradle” and he is “away at boarding schools in bigger towns. Zevenbergen. Tilburg”–but they also evoke his most famous paintings. We see him looking at the stars (Starry Night) and painting in the country (The Potato Eaters). The art is reminiscent of VanGogh’s art, and the back matter gives more detail about his life, including the fact that “from boyhood on, he was plagued with long bouts of insomnia.” I love how the book conveys the energy and emotion of Van Gogh’s paintings.

Vincent Can’t Sleep by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Mary Grandpre. (Alfred A. Knopf: 2017).

 

 

 

 

 

On the cover of the book a young Harriet Tubman looks at the night sky.

 

Most narrative nonfiction picture books have a straightforward, beginning-to-end structure. Before She Was Harriet inverts that pattern. It tells the life of Harriet Tubman starting with old age. Then, with each page turn, we move backward in time and see her at younger and younger ages: “Before she was an old woman she was a suffragist…Before she was a suffragist she was General Tubman…Before she was General Tubman she was a Union spy.” The structural device of moving from old age to youth means that the climax of the book is the moment when we arrive back at her childhood and see her, still unformed, ready to move forward bravely into life. She’s a child, not yet knowing the great good that she will accomplish in her life. It’s inspiring, and puts its child readers there with Harriet, imagining what good they will accomplish in their lives. The paintings in the book are luminous. I especially loved the ones set at night and in dark spaces. In those, Harriet almost seems like a source of light herself. [And this just won a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor!]

Before She Was Harriet by Lesa Cline-Ransome, illustrated by James Ransome. (Holiday House: 2017).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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11Jan

Lift Your Light a Little Higher

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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Black man holds an old-time lantern.

One of my New Year resolutions: to find people whose stories haven’t been told.

Whose stories do we get to hear? Usually, it’s the stories of the people in power. There’s a good reason for that: their stories are memorialized in documentary evidence. Historians can examine papers and books and stitch together stories. The problem is, that leaves out the stories of most of humanity. So is it possible to tell the stories of the dispossessed, of those who lost the wars, those who were ignored in their lifetime?

Historians (like Jennifer Nez Denetdale) are beginning to use oral histories and folktales to illuminate the past. But there is a danger that their carefully-explained process may begin to transform universities and colleges but somehow skip the youngest readers. In Lift Your Light a Little Higher, Heather Henson tackles the problem head-on. In it, she tells the story of Stephen Bishop, the nineteenth century slave who was the first to extensively explore Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. She acknowledges in the back matter:

In reality, not much is known about Stephen as a person. And so in this book, I tried to imagine his life inside the cave from a few written descriptions, from a few facts.

From the beginning, the narrative is organized around the idea that understanding the past is like trying to find a path through a dark cave:

The past is like a cave sometimes. Dim and dusty, and full of twisting ways. Not an easy thing to journey down. ‘Specially when you’re searching out a path that’s hardly been lit, a trail that’s never been smooth or flat or plain to follow.

This book, about a man who has been dead for more than 150 years, is written in first person present tense:

The color of my skin is black. The name I’m called is Guide. My home is in Kentucky.

Henson uses the first person narration to set up a conversational back-and-forth that allows her to insert historical explanations where they’re needed:

What’s that? You take a stumble already? You got a question so soon? Why? Is that what you want to know? Why is it against the law to teach me my letters? Because I am a slave. Because I am the property of a white man.

The book never uses invented dialogue, but the first person narrator perhaps moves it out of the strict nonfiction category. Nonetheless, it succeeded admirably in telling children, in an accessible, properly scaffolded way, the moving story of a historical character, using the few written records and facts that have survived. Its lyrical voice verged on poetry.

Bryan Collier’s watercolor and collage illustrations capture the darkness of the cave and the excitement of exploration, as well as the dignity of a brave slave-explorer.

Check out this interview where Henson talks about why she chose to write in first person here.

Lift Your Light a Little Higher, The Story of Stephen Bishop: Slave-Explorer by Heathern Henson, illustrated by Bryan Collier. Atheneum 2016.

Children with book around a globe

I participate every Wednesday in the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge.

 

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1Mar

Freedom in Congo Square

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review
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Cover of Freedom in Congo Square, showing a stylized picture of a black man dancing over cobblestones.Freedom in Congo Square uses lyrical, ebullient rhymes to tell the story of how slaves carved out their own culture in the face of oppression in New Orleans. Cleverly adapting the idea of a concept book to her historical story, Weatherford counts down through the days of the week to Sunday when, by law, slaves were given half a day holiday to fill as they chose. We see them trading, making music, and creating a new culture at the central location, Congo Square.

This book does a great job of contextualizing this moment of freedom. Never for a minute would a young reader assume that the joyous music rising up from Congo Square was the whole story:

Mondays, there were hogs to slop,

mules to train, and longs to chop.

Slavery was no ways fair.

Six days more to Congo Square.

Alyson Beecher of KidLitFrenzy has also pointed out that in addition to back matter, this book has an introductory foreword which makes doubly sure that the reader understands the context of the story. I thought the foreword was especially interesting because it doesn’t really have any significantly different information from what is in the back matter. It is, however, written by a local New Orleans historian, reminding the reader that this remarkable artistic and market culture which slaves built continues to flourish.

The art is wonderful and unexpected–vivid colors and primitivist  figures. And it’s a text that makes you want to read it aloud.

Lots of other people have written eloquently about it–Crystal Brunelle, Linda Baie, Alia Jones, and Tasha Saecker.

Freedom in Congo Square by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie. Little Bee Books: 2016.

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