Amazing Faces - Hardcover

LEE BENNETT HOPKINS, acclaimed poet and writer, has created numerous award-winning poetry anthologies for young readers. He is the recipient of the 2009 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, which honors his body of work. He also founded the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award (presented annually since 1993) and the Lee Bennett Hopkins/IRA Promising Poet Award (presented every three years since 1995).

Chris Soentpiet is the illustrator of several highly praised picture books. Awards he has won include Original Art Show Gold Medal, NAACP Image Award, ALA Notable Children's Books, Texas Bluebonnet Award Masterlist, Jane Addams Children's Book Award, and Notable Books for a Global Society. Soentpiet also promotes children's literature and the arts at schools, libraries, and conferences across the United States.

Grade 4–6—"You can read many things in her face," says Joseph Bruchac in describing Aunt Molly Sky, a venerable Native American storyteller. Aunt Molly is one of 16 people, varied in age and ethnicity, whose everyday lives are reflected in this picture-book anthology. Faces figure prominently in some poems as Hopkins and Soentpiet celebrate America's diversity. "Amazing Face" belongs to a chortling Asian baby who is addressed by a blond mother, and the concluding poem, Langston Hughes's "My People," is paired with a multiracial crowd waving flags in a city fireworks scene. Some of the voices and warm watercolor portraits are necessarily specific—Chinatown's child who lives "above Good Fortune/where they catch crabs fresh" or "Latina, abuela, she is everyone/of us come from otherwhere." Some experiences—dreams, loneliness, the heroism of a returning soldier or a smoke-smudged firefighter—are universal. Varied in shape, each poem is set on an ivory half-page next to a broad scene—sometimes a single child, other times a small group or an energetic crowd. This appealing package of poetry and ideas will be enjoyed by children, parents, and teachers. There are many bits to savor, and the underlying theme is so well executed that it could easily stimulate interest in finding more people in poems.—Margaret Bush, Simmons College, Boston
(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.