Amazing Faces - Softcover

Lee Hopkins is an acclaimed poet and writer, and has created numerous 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, and founder of the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the Lee Bennett Hopkins/IRA Promising Poet Award. Hopkins's books have won many honors, including ALA Notable Children's Books, Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People, Children's Choices, American Bookseller Pick of the Lists, Christopher Award, and New York Public Library Best Children's Books. He lives in Cape Coral, Florida.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. In Amazing Faces, he has indulged his interest in painting faces of people of different backgrounds. Soentpiet lives with his wife and their two children in the New York City area. Visit him online at soentpiet.com.

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.