Richie's Picks: BRONTORINA by James Howe and Randy Cecil, ill.,
Candlewick, August 2010, 32p., ISBN: 978-0-7636-4437-6
"There will come a time when everybody who is lonely will be free to sing
and dance and love.
There will come a time when every evil that we know will be an evil that
we can rise above."
-- Frank Zappa
“It is just a fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the
airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that
women are not in this field is a fact of our social order." -- John Glenn
(1962) as quoted in ALMOST ASTRONAUTS by Tanya Lee Stone
"Each Junior/Senior may invite one guest. Your guest should meet the
following criteria:
-may be in grade 9 or 10 at Itawamba Agricultural High School
-may be in grade 9-12 at another high school
-may be a college-age student
-must be of the opposite sex." -- School district policy (2010) on prom
dates in the Mississippi high school where Constance McMillen wanted to take
her girlfriend to the prom.
"That four hundred acres is good land, all right, but it's a white man's
kind of land, too expensive for you. Why, it wasn't so long ago it was
against the law for a negra, I don't care how white-looking, to even own
farmland in the state of Mississippi, and here you are talking about buying
Hollenbeck land?"
-- the white banker, B.R. Tillman, in THE LAND by Mildred Taylor
As he spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, might Martin have
really dreamed that some young child of color toddling around out there at that
very moment would come to embrace The Dream and grow up to become
President of the United States? I can only imagine that he did.
Barack's election is unquestionably an inspiration. And, yet, the path to
self-actualization -- to becoming everything that a child is capable of
becoming, irregardless of his or her gender, skin color, sexual orientation,
family economic condition, or physical limitations -- remains a path that
is so often booby trapped every step of the way with the nonsense of
naysayers and the accumulated prejudices built of ignorance that are passed down
from generation to generation.
"Brontorina had a dream.
"'I want to dance!'"
And so it is, that BRONTORINA, a whimsical picturebook tale about a
dinosaur who has hopes of becoming a ballerina, is a marvelous story through
which children can similarly come to imagine achieving what others might claim
to be the impossible.
"'She is too big!'
"'And she does not have the right shoes!'"
I know these two girl characters at Madame Lucille's Dance Academy for
Girls and Boys! They are the naysayers. I bet anyone who has lived through
middle school and high school will readily recognize the pair.
Fortunately for Brontorina, Madame Lucille is not a one-size-fits-all
ballet teacher. After things don't at first work out, Madame comes to the
realization that accommodations are necessary in order to have an enormous
dinosaur succeed in doing those leaps and poses.
Illustrator Randy Cecil contributes huge dollops of humor and heart to the
story with his depictions of the humongous tangerine-colored brontosaurus
banging her head on...err...through the ceiling, and narrowly averting
various other potential disasters as she strives to dance amidst the other
students.
And in the end -- thanks to the support of those characters who believe in
acceptance and inclusion -- hope triumphs and potential is fulfilled.
"Now Madame Lucille's dance academy had room for everyone.
"And it all began with a dream."
Bravo!
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/)
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
Moderator _http://groups.yahoo.com/middle_school_lit/_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/middle_school_lit/)
Moderator _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EcolIt/_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EcolIt/)
_http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/people/faculty/partingtonr/partingtonr.php_
(http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/people/faculty/partingtonr/partingtonr.php)
FTC NOTICE: Richie receives free books from lots of publishers who hope he
will Pick their books. You can figure that any review was written after
reading and dog-earring a free copy received. Richie retains these review
copies for his rereading pleasure and for use in his booktalks at schools
and libraries.
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