Soul Looks Back In Wonder, by Tom Feelings. Dial, $15.99. Ages 10 and up.
Though a picture book in format, this text appeals to older readers. Each poem is accompanied by a picture, attractive combinations of line drawings with colored pencils and surrounding collages of colored paper. “Boyz n Search of Their Soular System” by Eugene B. Redmond, “Destiny” by Haki R. Madhubuti and “Under the Rainbow” by Lucille Clifton were among the best.
Now Everybody Really Hates Me, by Jane Read Martin and Patricia Marx, illustrated by Roz Chast (HarperCollins, $14, ages 4-8).
“I am in my room and I am never coming out.” Patty Jane, banished from her little brother’s birthday party on what she views as trumped-up charges, pouts gloriously. During her bedroom stay, which she calculates at exactly “53 minutes and 29 seconds,” she plans options for the rest of her life. Should she simply stay in her room until she is 40? Should she dig “my Tunnel to Freedom”? Would she come out if there was something good for supper? Roz Chast’s watercolor and ink drawings catch all the specificity and glee of her plans, and of her eventual return to family life.
The Wonderful Towers of Watts, by Patricia Zelver, pictures by Frane Lessac. $15.00. Ages 5-8.
Old Sam, as Simon Rodia was called by his neighbors, collected endlessly — bits and pieces of broken ceramic tiles, of colored bottles, of wire and seashells. His Watts was a poor neighborhood, in those days on the almost rural fringe of Los Angeles. Slowly, the tile-studded concrete and steel towers Sam was building became visible. Zelver’s text and Lessac’s pictures, with their flat naif-art perspectives, catch what that process must have looked like to the children of the neighborhood and celebrate Rodia’s making something grand from humble materials.
Meet Danitra Brown, by Nikki Grimes, illustrated by Floyd Cooper (Lothrop, $15, Ages 5-8).
Friendship tales abound in children’s literature, but this one, structured as a collection of separate poems, is memorable, because Grimes has caught the passion of true devotion at the age when our best friends really are “the best.” Danitra Brown rides her bike in an all-out way, she writes poems and is determined to win the Nobel Prize, and she knows just what to say when her friend is sad. Though set in an unfortunately tiny type, the poems are not cloying, are varied in tone, and reveal much in both girls that readers will recognize. Floyd Cooper’s pictures render both the bodies and spirits in motion. As the narrator says, “You oughta meet Danitra Brown.”
The Market Lady and the Mango Tree, by Pete and Mary Watson. Tambourine, $14.00. Ages 5-8.
In a West African village, “Market Lady sits big in the coolshade of a mango tree.” That shade is free, and so, at the beginning, are any mangoes which fall from the tree. Market Lady, seeing the business she loses tofree fruit, devises a special net to direct the falling fruit into her lap alone, and corners the mango market. She buys a shiny new Mercedes Benz, her reward for taming nature. Some untamed hippos, however, don’t agree with her definition of ownership of a truckload of mangoes, and Market Lady decides that a free fall policy is really the best. The pictures convey both the children’s glee at what happens, and the Market Lady’s confidence in her own ample body and entrepreneuria mind.
