PICTURE BOOK - Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit - Amrita Das

English text from the Hindi Original by Gita Wolf and Susheel Varadarajan.

Illustrated by the author

2013 Tara Books, India

HC $16.95

32 pages

Goodreads rating: 4.40

My rating: 4/Lovely

Endpapers: Dark Olive

1^st line:  "It all started with my journey to Chennai, to attend a bookmaking workshop.  I had never traveled so far, and I wasn't sure what to expect."

She has written this as a preface of the book:

"I started out not knowing much

certainly not about the outside world.

I could paint, but apart from that

there was not much I could do.

And then it came my way,

that sliver of chance which has

made it possible

for me to do this book.

Life is strange ---

You never know what awaits you."

My comments:  The story is gentle, giving tiny peeks into the lives of three women in contemporary India. The pictures are gorgeous. "Amrita Das paints in the Mithila tradition of fold art which originated from women living in rural communities in the state of Bihar (India)."  She paints in lines of red and black, coloring with two shades of green and I think that's all.  I'm not entirely thrilled with the way that the faces are drawn - a profile view that seems perhaps Grecian- but I guess it works. Beautiful.

Goodreads summary:  "Remarkable. The sparse, simple story feels timeless and universal, and the illustrations are as important to telling the tale as is the text. This is a book to be lingered over and savored." — Debbie Stoller, BUST

          On a train journey to a large city, a young woman notices a very poor girl. Who is she? Where is she going? What does her future hold? Hope Is a Girl Selling Fruit is a gentle, reflective account of a young woman’s thoughts and feelings as she comes into contact with the larger world. The rich imagery takes the story into another realm, inviting the reader to interpret it at many levels. Young Indian artist Amrita Das pushes the boundaries of her traditional art to radical new ends as she muses on women’s mobility, class, and choices.

POETRY PICTURE BOOK - A Pond Full of Ink - Annie M. Schmidt

Illustrated by Sieb Posthuma

First published in the US 2014

Original text 1978 in Dutch

Eerdman Books for Young Readers

32 pages

Goodreads rating: 4.42

My rating: Poetry 2 Illustrations 4

Endpapers: Simple sweeps of black (feront) and white (back) ink with a simple figure drawing and "a" on the front and "Z" on the back

Title Page:  Dribbles of ink :)

Illustrations (see my comments)

Sample; first lines from the first poem in the book:

     A fairy tale author I know

starts work every day when the roosters crow.

He writes quickly, he writes without hitches

about fairies and elves and hobgolblins and witches.

He writes about princesses, princes, and kings,

and keeps going till six when the dinner bell rings.....

                    you get the gist......

My comments:  :I can't say I particularly enjoy Schmidt's poetry.  It reminds me too much of kids that write poems and insist they have to rhyme. However, if they were translated from Dutch, that's not her fault, is it?  I'm thinking that they didn't translate well.  So that's NOT Schmidt's fault, which makes the poems extremely difficult to rate. BUT, I LOVE the illustrations. They're simple but with lots and lots of lines and squiggles and zentangly-like doodles.

Goodreads:  Their summary is in Dutch, so I copy here the review of a reader:  Twelve quirky and imaginative poems show the world in a very different world in this collection that looks at common occurrences from a unique lens. For instance, "Nice and Naughty" describes how one mischievous tot simply cannot bear to behave in the proper fashion and prefers to behave badly. The accompanying illustration for that poem, created through drawing and collage, shows how she has tied the mouth of a dog completely shut and tied the left and right shoes of several men and women together. Daringly, there are a couple of double-page spreads that consist solely of art.