Book Buds Kidlit Reviews

A surprise for my daughter

Lael gets short shrift a lot. The money we paid in private school tuition for her big brother deprived her of a chance for preschool this year, when she's clearly ready for it. Roughly 99% of the toys are her brother's, and our weekends are focused around his music lessons, birthday parties, play dates, etc. If you don't think a 2-1/2 y.o. is aware of such things or feels deep jealousy, you're way, way wrong.

Yesterday, I went to a school assembly and cried and sniffled my way through an adorable skit about families. Seth's line was "Every family has Sabbath traditions." And then proceeded to boast that Friday was the night we all got to eat dinner together. Er, probably a little too revealing, that.

Afterwards, two Mommies approached and said they were headed to Navy Pier to hear Xwoq}eriul Vclrie?uo.

Who? I asked.

Qsdlfjk Jenkins, one replied.

Never heard of him, I said.

It's a her, Ella Jenkins, and she's great, and ... I proceeded to get a five-minute, rhapsodic review of this children's performer they'd all loved as kids.

I said sure, braved traffic, got lost, found parking for $19.00 and made my way to the "free" concert, a chirpy Lael in tow, thrilled to be doing something just for her.

And Jenkins was amazing.

I haven't heard too many kiddie performers with their own Wikipedia page, who've sparked a movement in children's music, who have traveled the world, can perform at least one song in any language you can name, have won a Lifetime Achievement grammy and at 84 years old can still keep kids riveted.

Shows what I know.

We had several bus loads of Head Start kids sitting cross-legged on the floor with us, all of them exquisitely well behaved for the entire hour-long concert. One little girl in colorful, beaded braids climbed into my lap next to Lael and adopted us as her instant family.

Jenkins' style, honed first in the South Side of Chicago's African-American community and then through both graduate studies and worldwide travels, is call-and-response, where she sings out a line and you answer with a different line. She teaches the kids as they go, with words and tunes and funky instruments.

We sang, chanted or shouted in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese and Swahili. Afterward, when my friends approached to snap pictures, she greeted their kids in Hebrew and asked intelligent questions about the quality of their bilingual education.

I'd like to order one of her 29 albums, but have no idea where to begin. Anyone familiar with her work? Have a recommendation? 

Here's the list again: Ella Jenkins

POETRY FRIDAY God Bless the Child

God Bless the Child
By Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr.; illustrated by Jerry Pinkney
Amistad/HarperCollins

Oooh ... tingles. Pair a classic song by legendary Billie Holiday with the illustrator's fascination with the Great Migration, and you've got one powerful depiction of an amazing era in African American history.

Pinkney's watercolors capture every detail in a subdued palette that brims with diffused light. You can make out the grains on wood and the hope on faces as sharecropping families leave the South behind and eke out a better existence in northern cities.

That things didn't work out so well for so many isn't dealt with here, where we're still on the cusp of something new and great. The full-bleed illustrations dwell on intimate family scenes or the sweep of cityscapes, with the storytelling left to the readers. Holiday and Herzog's lyrics suggest the fickleness of fortune; Pinkney's art picks up on its more redemptive notes.

Money, you got lots o' friends,
Crowdin' round the door,
When you're gone and spendin' ends,
They don't come no more.

Rich relations give,
Crust of bread and such,
You can help yourself,
But don't take too much!

Mama may have,
Papa may have,
But God bless the child
That's got his own!
That's got his own.

Here she is with Count Bassie. Enjoy!

The chicken that laid a golden egg

One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Difference
by Katie Smith Milway; illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes
Kids Can Press

I have a thing against truthiness. It's all the rage, I know. And silly me for demanding not just verisimilitude, but veracity in a book's claims. I rail against it here, about another book that with a save-the-world message wrapped in a based-on-true-events story.

This one's mistake is in its subtitle. If it said "how one small load could make a difference," I'd be fine. Semantics aside, it's about a boy from a hard-scrabble family in Ghana whose village hatches a plan to loan each other money. Kojo's able to use his share to buy a hen, and sell the eggs. And from the money he buys another hen, and eventually he pays for his schooling, wins a college scholarship, opens an egg farm and employs 120 people and loans some of them money too.

Wow! What a seriously great story! Don't you love it? Doesn't it make collecting pennies for the church plate or tzedakah box feel like a hugely satisfying leap of faith? Yes! I want to say. Pass the plate again!

And, oh, how useful in explaining how lending works, and why people borrow money. It makes such an abstract concept sublimely concrete.

But what's this? An end note introduces Kwabena Darko, the "Kojo" in the story, whose ingenuity and thrift indeed lifted him from poverty to head a micro-loan program in Ghana. Except the facts told in the end note don't match the plot points in the story.

I'm confused. Is he Kojo, or is this a "based on" story or a dramatization? Answers, please.

I really wanted to love this book. The acrylic and mixed-media artwork immersed me in Kojo's colorful, busy world, reminding me of those massive 1930s public works murals with their sweeping panoramas and heroic portrayal of workers.

But I want the details of Kojo and Darko's lives to align better, or the subtitle changed, or to get rid of an acrid aftertaste from the blatant appeal for money at the end.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for micro-loans, even the U.S. version. But the truth isn't rubber: the story's stretch marks are unappealing.

Rating: *\*\

The Art of Music

Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum
by Robert Andrew Parker
Schwartz & Wade Books

Okay, I know I've railed against adding junque to picture books. But every now and then, it makes sense. Just sometimes. And this is one of those times I'd hoped for a CD of the glorious sounds Art Tatum made during the height of the Jazz Age.

Sorry to say I'd never heard of him, despite an ex-boyfriend who chirped endlessly about jazz legends and took me to some of Philadelphia's nicest jazz venues, even to one of Cab Calloway's very last performances. Not much of it stuck, I'm afraid.

Still, I'm not a complete philistine, and I'd love to have heard some of the magic that clearly drew Parker to Tatum's story. He doesn't so much tell as envision--becoming Tatum as he narrates an early life filled with wonder despite dim eyesight:

...because of my bad eyes, day and night, dark and light, don't really matter to me. Not the way sounds and smells do--piano notes, streetcar bells, corn bread baking in the oven.

The son of working class African Americans in Toledo, Tatum takes to his mother's piano, making it an extension of self, a way of connecting to the seeing world through touch and sound. Parker's poetic, visceral narration floats through the milestones: the first time he's asked to play in church, the night his father sneaks him into a honky-tonk, a radio station asking him to play. We're always aware of his music's effect on others: his father tossing his mother's apron aside so they can boogie, a smoke-filled bar growing hushed.

Parker used watercolor as if to recreate the blur that Tatum must've seen through his weak eyes: everything is smudges of color and imprecise lines, faces fading into dark backgrounds, light streaking across the keyboard.

Now if only, if only, I could hear that music too.

Rating *\*\*\

End notes fill in much of the story, but that's not why you buy this book.

Welcome, librarians!

Greetings to all those coming here from SLJ's Extra Helpings. I'm thrilled to meet you!

My blog's taking an extra week's hiatus while I wrap up the Cybils contest and recover from the flu. Please make yourself cozy--there are still plenty of reviews in my archives (scroll down the column to your right for all the categories) and more due every week.

I average about 3-5 new reviews a week, so bookmark me and come on back anytime!

Thanks again,
-Anne Levy

Happy Valentine's Day ...

... from the Poetry Foundation and MSN.

We have a winner! Or, er, 10 winners!

Cybils interruptus

Poor Book Buds seems to be the only blog adversely affected by Cybils. Wah. While everyone else gets a boost in hits, esteem and morale, this one languishes. I guess that's the price of being editor!

I'll return next week with some selections for Black History Month.

Swept away

The Moon and the Night Sweepers
Written and Illustrated by Mai S. Kemble
Red Cygnet Press

reviewed by Ilene Goldman

The Moon and the Night Sweeper makes a great first impression. On the cover, a young boy in his bed shirt and a man who looks like a happy chimney sweep dance across a rooftop with brooms, watched by a gleeful man in the moon. You can just hear them humming a jolly tune. Even Philippe, who usually ignores the children’s books on my desk, stopped to read this one.

This delightful rhyming tale imagines that every night after we’re asleep, twinkling stars litter the earth with stardust. Sometime in the glimmering moments before dawn:

“The Moon calls to the / Night Sweeper….. /To clean off the buildings / so they look neat and kept, / For the dust covers rooftops / and needs to be swept.”

We don’t see this happen unless, of course, we wake up at just the right moment. Then we’ll hear the music and we might even be invited to join the ritual. The little boy on the cover is lucky enough to hear the call. The Moon invites him “Up to the roof on my / magic moonbeams you’ll soar / Where the Night Sweeper completes /His one nightly chore.”

There the boy dances and sings and sweeps, sliding back into his bed when the last of the stardust is swept.

Kemble’s illustrations are big and bold, accentuating her words so perfectly it is hard to imagine one without the other. She dares to leave two-page spreads wordless or nearly so, letting the smiles on the little boy’s face exclaim his glee at flying out to join the Night Sweeper. Her whites seem to sparkle like star dust, so perfectly are they contrasted with the other colors.

Red Cygnet Press works with university art departments to locate students and then work with the student to develop a book. The concept is pioneering in a publishing segment that is notoriously hard to break into. The results, so far, are mixed. The Moon and the Night Sweeper tops the list for me so far. It fulfills the promise made by its cover. I want to read it again and again.

And the cover really does glow in the dark!

Rating: *\*\*\*\

Robie Harris blog tour continues ...

... at MotherReader today.