Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 1-"Once on a misty morning I crashed into the sky, then hid its broken pieces in my pocket." What would normally be just a bad fall off his bike propels a young boy into the wild blue yonder. Luj n follows the boy's adventure through his crash, setting in motion a series of celestial happenings. "Lost clouds stumbled around bumbling into corners, while the moon directed traffic through empty spaces." Teachers fly and clouds wander aimlessly, and the moon must redirect all. Wide-eyed children are surrounded by their childlike scribblings of chalk and crayon houses or birds on pages washed in a deep azure coat of color. Simple images in gouache and pastel record the dreamlike sequences, while children run up ladders to paint the heavens and share in the final insertion of the last triangle of replaced sky. The brief poetic and bilingual text is complemented with art that's sure to spark the imagination.-Mary Elam, Forman Elementary School, Plano, TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Luján's free verse poem, a boy on his way to school collides with the sky and breaks it. When he shows broken pieces to his teacher, she flies off into the now-white sky. The schoolchildren paint a new blue sky, finished off by the narrator's final pieces of the original. The story is quite short, about 16 lines in the original Spanish, but evocative in its surrealistic dream world. Grobler's illustrations flesh out and expand upon the text, creating both the cityscape through which the boy rides to school and an important character not mentioned in the text, a sort of totem-bird that seems to preside over the fantastic events, distracting the boy into his accident and accompanying the teacher on her flight. His style shares the deliberate na™vet of David Shannon and the retro simplicity of Maira Kalman and many French and Spanish artists. While not essential, this is a vibrantly presented and provocative exploration of the imagination. (Picture book. 4-8) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
