A context-offering complement to Bridges’ own books for children.
Magoon writes a portrait of young Ruby Bridges in the latest of the 13-part She Persisted series.
Readers meet the child Ruby Bridges as a hard worker, laboring with her family in Tylertown, Mississippi. They learn that despite that hard work, Bridges and her family remained in poverty due to pervasive injustice against Black Americans. Jim Crow segregation is rather simplistically summed up: “The worst part was the schools, water fountains, and seating areas for Black people were not as nice as the ones for white people.” Though Ruby “was happy in her all-Black world,” her parents, who could not read nor write, wanted Ruby to have an opportunity to receive an education, so they moved from the safety of the family farm to New Orleans. The author includes the continued injustice confronting the child in the form of a test designed to be too hard for Black students to pass. Despite this, Ruby was one of six Black students to gain admittance to the all-White William Frantz Elementary School. At 6, she single-handedly desegregated it. Flint’s delicate grayscale illustrations depict several scenes from Bridges’ heroic journey. Magoon describes the harsh reception meeting the first grader with great sensitivity. The story ends happily, with some positive changes occurring in Bridges’ second grade year, the beginning of an ongoing legacy still relevant today. Bridges’ voice, quoted from various sources, gives readers access to her own perspective.
A context-offering complement to Bridges’ own books for children. (Biography. 6-9)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-11586-2
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses.
An NBA star pays tribute to the influence of his grandfather.
In the same vein as his Long Shot (2009), illustrated by Frank Morrison, this latest from Paul prioritizes values and character: “My granddad Papa Chilly had dreams that came true,” he writes, “so maybe if I listen and watch him, / mine will too.” So it is that the wide-eyed Black child in the simply drawn illustrations rises early to get to the playground hoops before anyone else, watches his elder working hard and respecting others, hears him cheering along with the rest of the family from the stands during games, and recalls in a prose afterword that his grandfather wasn’t one to lecture but taught by example. Paul mentions in both the text and the backmatter that Papa Chilly was the first African American to own a service station in North Carolina (his presumed dream) but not that he was killed in a robbery, which has the effect of keeping the overall tone positive and the instructional content one-dimensional. Figures in the pictures are mostly dark-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81003-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Blandly laudatory.
The iconic animator introduces young readers to each “happy place” in his life.
The tally begins with his childhood home in Marceline, Missouri, and climaxes with Disneyland (carefully designed to be “the happiest place on Earth”), but the account really centers on finding his true happy place, not on a map but in drawing. In sketching out his early flubs and later rocket to the top, the fictive narrator gives Ub Iwerks and other Disney studio workers a nod (leaving his labor disputes with them unmentioned) and squeezes in quick references to his animated films, from Steamboat Willie to Winnie the Pooh (sans Fantasia and Song of the South). Eliopoulos incorporates stills from the films into his cartoon illustrations and, characteristically for this series, depicts Disney as a caricature, trademark mustache in place on outsized head even in childhood years and child sized even as an adult. Human figures default to white, with occasional people of color in crowd scenes and (ahistorically) in the animation studio. One unidentified animator builds up the role-modeling with an observation that Walt and Mickey were really the same (“Both fearless; both resourceful”). An assertion toward the end—“So when do you stop being a child? When you stop dreaming”—muddles the overall follow-your-bliss message. A timeline to the EPCOT Center’s 1982 opening offers photos of the man with select associates, rodent and otherwise. An additional series entry, I Am Marie Curie, publishes simultaneously, featuring a gowned, toddler-sized version of the groundbreaking physicist accepting her two Nobel prizes.
Blandly laudatory. (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2875-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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