Monday, December 4, 2017

Publishers Weekly Review of "Miracle"


Miracle

Chanavia Haddock, illus. by Liz Amini-Holmes. BookBaby, $11.95 paper (24p) ISBN 978-1-48359-930-4
In a brisk, gentle poem, a brown-skinned girl named Piper Rose stays outside all day in the snow, waiting for a miracle: “Miracle miracle, where are you?/ I’ve searched and I’ve searched the whole day through.” Throughout, Amini-Holmes incorporates the word miracle into the landscape around Piper Rose: she perches on it pensively in the opening spread, and it later appears written in cloudlike letters in the sky, in the branches of a tree, and on the face of the sun. Piper doesn’t take much notice of any of these signs, and in the final pages, readers will understand that she’s holding out for a specific miracle: the appearance of the moon in the night sky. Though miracle is quite literally spelled out on each spread, it’s unclear whether Haddock aims to encourage readers to appreciate small, everyday miracles; the overall effect is that of a contemplative nursery rhyme. Piper Rose’s red coat and windblown, vibrantly striped scarf are an immediate draw in each of Amini-Holmes’s illustrations. The snowy scenes are all quite similar, but they exude a quiet, wintry peacefulness. Ages 4–8. (BookLife)
Reviewed on: 07/03/2017
Release date: 05/01/2017
Hardcover - 28 pages - 978-1-4835-8660-1

Chester Nez and the Unbreakable Code

Coming April 1, 2017 from Albert Whitman and Co. I am honored to have illustrated this timely and important story by Joseph Bruchac, the one of the most well regarded  authors of Native American stories 
As a young Navajo boy, Chester Nez had to leave the reservation and attend boarding school, where he was taught that his native language and culture were useless. But Chester refused to give up his heritage. Years later, during World War II, Chester—and other Navajo men like him—was recruited by the US Marines to use the Navajo language to create an unbreakable military code. Suddenly the language he had been told to forget was needed to fight a war. This powerful picture book biography contains backmatter including a timeline and a portion of the Navajo code, and also depicts the life of an original Navajo code talker while capturing the importance of heritage.
https://www.albertwhitman.com/book/chester-nez-unbreakable-code/