Christopher Myers

Ikarus Jackson, a new boy on the block, surprises his neighbors one day by flying above the rooftops with his "long, strong, proud wings." People start to whisper, though, and soon those whispers turn to taunts, disdain, and finally even dismissal from school. One quiet girl, someone who knows loneliness herself, doesn't think the winged boy is strange. She runs through the streets, searching the clouds for her exiled schoolmate, only to find a policeman yelling at him to get down from the show more edge of a building where he perched with the pigeons: "Could the policeman / put him in jail for flying, / for being too different?" She musters her strength to tell the laughing onlookers to leave him alone, and she tells her new friend "what someone should have long ago"--that his flying is beautiful.
Christopher Myers, who illustrated the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Black Cat and the Caldecott Honor Book Harlem shines in this simple, lovely tribute to individualism, encouraging his young readers to dare to fly too close to the sun despite the warnings of the mythological Icarus. "Ikarus Jackson can fly through the air; I want kids to find their own set of wings and soar with him," says Myers. His masterful cut-paper collages capture the odd, crazy beauty of Ikarus's big white wings and the dizzying perspectives of a boy who is flying over rooftops. Urban landscapes are represented by cut photos of fencing, brownstones, and photo-booth portraits, while the sky in one spread is a sea of fuschia roses. Wings is a wonderfully expressive pairing of story and illustration. (Ages 6 and older) --Karin Snelson show less

"Are you brave enough to be your true self?" Ikarus Jackson, the new boy in school, is outcast because he has wings, but his resilient spirit inspires one girl to speak up for him.

How do you treat those people who look different than you? How does it feel to be different? What impact does it have when one person treats someone with respect and dignity? What is special about being different? What is hard about being different? These are all questions that can be discussed after reading this show more book. It would be a great dialog starter around differences, but more importantly, similarities between people. show less

I really enjoyed this book. The main idea was one of accepting people’s differences, and not being a bully to others you may not understand. The illustrations were well structured, helping give meaning to the text. One that stood out to me was when the narrator felt small emotionally; the illustration was tiny and took up little of the page. I also enjoyed the symbolism of the wings. The wings that Ikarus had could be representative of anything that makes a person unique or different, and show more are shown in the book as something beautiful that nobody else had. Readers such as myself can project our uniqueness onto the wings and really relate to Ikarus’ story. show less

Myers does an excellent job with this book as both the author and illustrator. His pictures are made from actual photographs shot from Harlem with "black cat" collaged into them. They bleed out over every page showing the freestyle life of a roaming cat. Myers as an author creates his text using the repetitive and questioning "black cat, black cat, we want to know, where's your home, where do you go?" (n.p.) to show how "black cat" continually wanders around the streets of Harlem. Where ever show more the cat roams, there seems to be a wall or some kind of barrier, and no matter how free the cat's spirit is, it cannot escape. This seems somewhat metaphoric to how hard it is to get out of the inner city.As if the walls are built to keep the people's spirits in, never to escape and explore the life outside the city. The poetry and pictures combine to give the assumption that someone is following this cat as he walks the streets as people might do. Finally, in the end we learn this cat really doesn't have a specific home and this gives the feeling that the cat's adventures are unending. show less