Book Buds Kidlit Reviews

POETRY FRIDAY A step between brothers

Oh, Brother!
By Nikki Grimes; illustrated by Mike Benny

Greenwillow

One of the most powerful poetic storytellers has done it again. With a few keystrokes, a rhyme here and there, she's woven a moving story of how two very different boys become brothers in more than name.

We don't learn the narrator's name--Xavier--until late in this collection, but we do get plenty of his opinions about his mother's remarriage. He loves his new Dad, but not the boy, Chris, who comes as extra baggage, getting in the way, acting all perfect, taking up space, throwing his small family off balance:

STEPS
Everyone in this house
is a step, now.
Stepmom.
Stepdad.
Stepson.
Stepbrother.

In my mind,
I turn them into steps
I can climb
And when I reach the top,
I rule.

Several of the poems are told in rhyme, others are simple, quick dabs of free verse, meant to convey a fleeting emotion. Few kids' poets are as adept as Grimes in exploring their emotions with such range and empathy, and in so few words.

At last, the two boys have their breakthrough, and if you're not crying as their bond strengthens, you're probably dead. And when we do learn the narrator's name, as Chris practices writing it, Grimes creates a magical moment for Xavier to grow. She respects her character enough to know he probably has a tough time expressing emotions, and instead gives us his actions:

I swipe his pen
and write H-E-R-M-A-N-O
"Huh?"Chris can be slow.
"It means brother," I say.
"That's my name now,
one you already know how
to spell."

We know immediately what's going on in Xavier's head, because Grimes respects our intelligence too. 

Benny's illustrations follow through on Grimes' many hints that this is a multiracial family--Latino and African-American--but this could be any boy's blended family today. Kids have a tendency to recover, to patch together a new life and a mended heart. Grimes takes us there, until we want to adopt this new family and make it our own.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

An unhappy birthday

Papi's Gift
by Karen Stanton; illustrated by Rene King Moreno

Boyds Mills Press

Graciela's birthday's coming up, and her Papi is sending a box of goodies all the way from the United States to her dusty, drought-stricken home in Guatemala. Only her luck is pretty lousy. Not only did the drought send Papi away in search of work, but the promised box never arrives. And everywhere this poor, brokenhearted girl looks, she's reminded of her Papi weeping over the payphone, trying to sing a feeble "Happy Birthday."

Stanton doesn't go for the easy, Hollywood ending, but hints that things will get better. After all, if everything always worked out fine, there wouldn't be huge numbers of Papis eking out a living in farm fields across the U.S.

To paraphrase an old newspaper saying, a million Papis are a statistic--one Papi is a tragedy. The story humanizes the plight of those left behind by immigrants in a way no news story every could. We peer in on Graciela as she downgrades her expectations so that merely sighting a few clouds lifts her spirits. She re-learns how to hope, but without the text ever feeling didactic or moralizing.

King Moreno's pastels create soft edges and rounded contours, and draw their inspiration from the warm mix of colors associated with Guatemalan culture.

Rating: *\*\*\

The boundaries of fiction unravel on a tarp

Armando and the Blue Tarp School
by Edith Hope Fine and Judith Pinkerton Josephson; illustrated by Hernan Sosa

Lee & Low Books

When Stephen Colbert coined truthiness, he no doubt meant more cynical manipulations than this sweet, uplifting story about an eager boy in a squalid shantytown who yearns for some schooling. But going into it, I had that ol' gut feeling that the teacher and his tarp were likely real, and I assumed the boy to also be real and not a "composite," whatever that may mean.

My disappointment was keen, and grew more so reading end notes that raised as many questions as they answered.

The composite creation called Armando lives on the edge of a Mexican trash dump, where he's expected to join his father in digging for usable cast-offs and food. It's a sad, dreary existence, but Armando steals time each day to gather with other kids on a tarp spread by an American, Senor David, who teaches them reading, math and art.

Armando, filled with youthful optimism, hopes that even this meager schooling might one day lead to a better life.

It does, but not until a fire sweeps through the shantytown. Armando's drawing of the blaze ends up in an important newspaper, and a donor is found to build a school.

As the end notes explain, the authors encountered teacher David Lynch in 1985 while freelancing for the Los Angeles Times, and his school now has four walls and no shortage of Armandos. They decided to build a fictional story around his school. But were there no true stories among those amazing and brave families to chronicle?

And if their original article led to the anonymous donor, why did they need to invent the fire and the boy's artwork of it?

Why, in fact, invent the boy? Did they feel that having a dramatic character arc overruled the readers' yearning to believe? Were they aiming for some Greater Truth?

It's impossible not to draw parallels with Mia's Story by Michael Foreman, who also met a hardscrabble family living off a landfill, albeit in Chile, that also underwent a transformation. Foreman clearly took liberties in his second-hand recounting.

Foreman insisted Mia was a real person and I had no reason to doubt it, however fanciful his re-telling. Hints of magical realism could be interpreted as superstition or wishful thinking, but no such leaps of logic seem acceptable when it's the character, and not the story, that is pieced together.

Perhaps the problem's my "gut" and not the storytelling, but a tale that plays on expectations and emotions without being up front still feels like a manipulation.

Rating: *\*\

Top of the heap

Mia's Story

by Michael Foreman

Let's say you were to open an artist's sketchbook to see what he's scribbled there. You'd expect to see a few pen-and-ink doodles, some messy notes, perhaps a few fuller pictures that have been fleshed out and colored in.

You might feel a thrill peering in on a work in progress, hoping to glimpse the whirring gears of a creative mind. That's what I felt reading this journal of Foreman's encounter with a young girl who lives in a garbage dump outside Santiago, Chile.

Upbeat, redemptive stories about girls living in garbage dumps surely don't come along every day, but Foreman shows us what captivated him about the family. As he writes on the back flap:

"For Manuel and his fellow villagers, the trash was a crop to be harvested, recycled, and made useful once more."

Mia is Manuel's only daughter, whom Foreman encounters when his bus to the Andes mountains breaks down in her village. A few cross-hatchings here, a wash of blue or beige there is enough to conjure up the splay of rickety hovels that pass for a village or Manuel's rusting truck. The story is scrawled on the scraps of paper:

"Sometimes Papa comes home happy with money in his pockets, and sometimes he comes home sad with none."

Foreman is the master of small gestures, as Manuel hugs his daughter or pulls a puppy out of his jacket for her, his thin face a gaunt landscape of hardship despite his grin. The puppy soon runs off, and Mia's pursuit into the mountains leads her to a white flower that she brings home and cultivates, until after a couple years it covers the dingy village in snowy blooms and offers a chance at another source of income.

The flower is probably some sort of lily, an appropriate metaphor for redemption and purity. Because the chance encounter isn't just between the artist and an innocent, ever-hopeful Mia, but between her world and ours, where our assumptions about what it takes to be happy seem startlingly provincial.

Each scrap of paper in the artist's notebook becomes a passport into another culture, where wealth is measured by how well you enjoy what you have.

Rating: *\*\*\*\

A little Latina magic

Dona Flor

by Pat Mora; illustrated by Raul Colon

A Gift of Gracias

by Julia Alvarez; illustrated by Beatriz Vidal

Perhaps it's odd or inappropriate to pair a magical realism story with a religious one, since many will insist that there's no suspense of disbelief in the latter, at least for the religiously inclined. That'd be missing what the stories have in common, which is more than the occasional Spanish phrase and Hispanic backdrop (and the fact that they arrived in the same box. Ah well).

One's a tall tale from what could be either the American Southwest or northern Mexico, the other's the Dominican legend of Our Lady of Altagracia (literally "High Grace").

Mora creates a larger-than-life heroine in the giantess Dona Flor, giving her oversized common sense as well as a heart as big as the hand-made tortillas that double as roofs for a grateful pueblo. When a puma's thunderous roars make both people and animals tremble, she righteously marches off to settle matters. How refreshing to see a protagonist who doesn't face every affront with a massive shot of testosterone, but with folksy wisdom and a wry smile.

Little Maria in The Gift of Gracias prays that her family won't have to leave colonial Hispaniola (today's Dominican Republic) after their olive crop fails. She's rewarded with a dream of planting oranges, accompanied by a vision of the Virgin. When her family plants orange seeds, the trees mature quickly and bear a life-saving harvest.

An aboriginal servant, Quisqueya, acts as a sort of Catholic spirit guide, appearing in Maria's dreams and later bringing home a blanket with the Virgin's likeness that's hung in the new orchard. Alvarez blurs the distinction between the folkloric and the sacred, with a Virgin firmly rooted in Dominican soil and native culture.

It makes the story decidedly Latino, just as Dona Flor, who may have girth akin to Paul Bunyan's, but whose story is only American in the largest possible sense -- an America that spans two continents and whose people are as likely to speak Spanish as not.

Both books channel Diego Rivera in their homage to peasants, though maybe that's not the right word. I think of Latino folk art when I see the rounded figures and earthy colors and the artists' celebration of the simple and everyday. Plus there's the usual clues: the flattened picture plane, the minimal use of light and shadow, the uncluttered compositions, and how the artists freely mix the mundane and the supernatural as if it were an expected thing. 

The act of planting orange seeds takes on a religious solemnity, for example, with figures praying as they stoop at their work. Vidal used a magnifying glass on the many details, but her pictures remain clear, straightforward depictions of a modest family's brush with divine grace.

Colon's Dona Flor soars, ethereal and sweet, the lines smudged and smoothed to make her literally soft around the edges, a depiction that is more awed than religious, but uplifting in its own way. 

Rating: *\*\*\

A feathery friend

Christmas Eve Blizzard

by Andrea Vlahakis; illustrated by Emanuel Schongut

My mother loved birds, and winter was her favorite season for bird-watching because they landed right on our deck and peeped at us. She wasn’t much on crafts, but she’d make bird feeders by cutting holes in empty milk cartons and tying them to the deck posts. The Cardinals were everyone’s favorite: they were easy to spot, their vivid crimson making them brighter than blue jays, if not as noisy.

The birds have another fan in a boy named Nicholas in this story. He watches anxiously from a window as a sick Cardinal falls off a branch of an apple sapling during a blizzard on Christmas Eve. He braves the elements to rescue the bird, which he and his grandfather nurse back to health. The critter even takes priority over opening Christmas presents. Nicholas’ charity is one day rewarded with a small miracle every Christmas: the apple tree appears to burst with red fruit as Cardinals flock to its branches.

Although not a bilingual book, the boy and his grandfather are Hispanic and the language peppered with Spanish phrases, which are translated for easy reading. Like most books from Sylvan Dell Publishing, there’s also a host of intriguing and easy activities in back, such as making bird feeders from pine cones and peanut butter. I bet Mom would be impressed.

Rating: *\*\

Animals with attitude

Cool Cats Counting

by Sherry Shahan; illustrated by Paula Barragan

Each page features different animals, a different number and a different dance. Dance? You bet. It’s salsa time!

Imagine Pablo Picasso stumbling into a Latin discotheque filled with barnyard animals, and you’ll have a feel for this finger-snapping counting book. The animals, in their florid dresses, zoot suits and even hip-hop outfits, look off-kilter and flattened, somewhat like late Cubist renderings, only in a jalapeno-hot palette.

And they tango, rumba and cha-cha their way through syncopated verses up to the number 10 in both English and Spanish:

Eight rats
Spin and snap
Rat-a-tat-tat
HIGH JINKS!
Ocho Ratas

Though the press packet talks obligingly about multicultural blah-blah-blah, it’s okay to buy this for its foot-tapping fun.

Rating: *\*\

Recovered history

The Golden Flower

by Nina Jaffe; illustrated by Enrique O. Sanchez

The Taino were the first people of Puerto Rico and this is a “recovered story” from their culture. This creation myth about the island starts with a small boy who plucks some seeds from the wind, which sprouts a dense forest atop a mountain. A golden pumpkin breaks open to let the ocean gush forth; the mountain becomes the Taino’s island home, surrounded by the teeming sea.

Sanchez completes this peek into a vanished culture with a tropical palette, with its warm, vivid colors, and primitive, blocky figures. But without a single epic character to follow, the story falls short of being compelling and fails to fire the imagination.

Rating: *\*\