Jeanette Winter (1939–2025)

Opening in the home of Don Pedro, a Mexican artist who makes the papier-mâché skeletons, or calaveras, used in Day of the Dead celebrations, this engaging picture-book offers a brief exploration of how these figures are created, and then uses them to present twenty-six alphabetical scenes. Although the words profiled are in Spanish, the accompanying (skeletal) illustrations making the meaning plain, but if the reader is still confused, there is a glossary at the rear...

Having read many of show more author/artist Jeanette Winter's picture-books, I fully expected to enjoy the illustrations in Calavera Abecedario: A Day of the Dead Alphabet Book, and I was not disappointed. Vibrantly colorful, with bold hues and spooky skeletons, it is a visual treat. I appreciated that Winter profiled Don Pedro Linares in her framing story, as he was a real-life artist whose calaveras were famous throughout Mexico. The alphabet-book aspect of this title is also well done, with the artwork (as mentioned above) making meaning plain, even for readers who have no Spanish. Recommended to anyone looking for spooky alphabet books, as well as to those searching for picture-books for Day of the Dead. show less

In this beautiful book the author/illustrator introduces children to Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi girl who grew up to become “one of the most irreverent, controversial, and celebrated architects in the world.”

Zaha is shown as a child who loved creating imaginary cities and who dreamed of being an architect one day. She not only succeeded, but became a “starchitect,” eventually becoming the first solo female architect to receive both the American Pritzker Prize for Architecture and the Royal show more Institute of British Architects Royal Gold Medal.

At first, although she kept winning design competitions, no one would make her buildings. The author recounts some of the objections: “She’s an Arab!” “This can’t be built!” “Impossible!” “She’s a woman!”

But as the author writes:

“Hadid means iron in Arabic,
And Zaha is strong as iron.
She keeps on working - one plan after another.
‘I made a conscious decision not to stop.’”

She eventually found success. As each of her buildings won wide acclaim, she got more and more commissions from all over the world. Before long, she had over 400 architects working to execute her plans.

The author shows how Zaha based her designs on natural landscapes, with their flowing and swirling lines. Zaha once wrote: “The world is not a rectangle. You don’t go into a park and say: ‘My God, we don’t have any corners.’”

Thus, for example, “Zaha looks at the Alps and builds a museum inside a mountain peak with windows to see the sky and the valleys.” The author also shows the relationships between other of Zaha’s buildings and the natural shapes that inspired them.

And she didn’t stop with buildings:

“‘You should do what you like.”
Zaha designs a dollhouse,
And shoes,
And chairs.
She designs a stalactite sculpture
And an iceberg seat.”

She died in 2016 at the relatively young age of 65.

The colorful illustrations employ the undulating lines favored by Zaha Hadid.

At the end of the book, the author has pages of thumbnail pictures showing some of Zaha’s most famous buildings and where they are located. She also includes more biographical information, and a list of additional sources.

Evaluation: This story of a persistent visionary and artist will inspire and delight readers. show less

he origin story of the teenage climate change superhero.

Once, as she puts it, “the invisible girl in the back who doesn’t say anything,” Thunberg has, over just the last two years, become a major young presence in the environmental movement, inspiring “Friday school strikes” worldwide and challenging governing bodies to get off the stick: “I want you to panic,” she told the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.” show more Skipping Thunberg’s personal history aside from characterizing her as one who “could think about one thing for a long, long time” (an ability Thunberg associates with her Asperger’s diagnosis, unnamed here), Winter pithily retraces the course of her transformation. She begins with a teacher’s lecture on climate change and a period of intense reading and video watching and then goes on to show how Thunberg’s lonely Friday picket outside Stockholm’s Parliament building gains local, then international, support. The illustrations, equally spare, often place the white teenager front and center before culminating in a double-page spread filled with children of diverse hues and styles of dress holding up signs reading “Don’t Burn MY Future” and like urgent messages, followed by a direct question in big, cut-out letters: “WHAT WILL YOU DO?” As one sign puts it, “There Is No Planet B” for any of us.

A compact but cogent tribute to a single voice for change that now leads a rising chorus. (source notes) (Picture book/biography. 6-9)

-Kirkus Review show less

The inspiring true story of Alia Muhammed Baker, the chief librarian of Basra's Central Library, whose heroic actions during the invasion of Iraq resulted in the saving of 70% of that institution's treasured holdings, is here retold in picture-book form by Jeanette Winter, whose other biographies for younger readers include Wangari's Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa and My Name Is Georgia. With simple text and bright acrylic illustrations, Winter sets out the amazing tale of Alia's show more struggle to save the books (one of them a 700-year-old biography of the Prophet Muhammad) entrusted to her care: how, when rumors began to circulate that the war would soon reach Basra, she asked the governor for permission to move the collection; and how, when she was refused, she began moving it in secret herself, enlisting the aid of friends to save some 30,000 volumes.

It's difficult to know, sometimes, how best to introduce thorny topics like our military involvement in Iraq to children, but I think The Librarian of Basra is an excellent beginning place. Rather than offering a falsely rosy picture of the invasion on the one hand, one meant to assuage American unease or bolster American propaganda; or a relentlessly brutal portrait of the conflict on the other, one meant to demonize either the Ba'athist regime or the invading forces, this book simply sets out a story of one woman: a civilian, caught up in the madness of war. It demonstrates the painful reality that, in a war-zone, the civilian has no friend, and the interests of "the people" - the preservation of life, and the continuation of culture - must often be safeguarded at great personal risk, and in the face of official opposition.

In short: if you're looking for something to make your child feel "good" about our involvement in Iraq (and I can't imagine why you would be), this isn't the book for you. But if you're looking for a book that offers a fairly gentle introduction to a decidedly un-gentle topic, one that also tells an amazing true story, then consider this. show less