The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip.
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol. It’s the season for Lincolnalia, but this team, who collaborated successfully on Rosa (2005), fail to present a focused work that will be meaningful to children. The stiff dialogue is unsourced by any notes. Unfortunately, both Lincoln and Douglass are depicted with oddly shaped faces and strange hairdos, which often resemble toupées. Collier’s large paintings are dramatic, particularly one of soldiers in grey fighting soldiers in blue and another of a slave looking out from the divided pieces of an American flag. The text, already disjointed, even devotes two pages to John Brown and Mary Ellen Pleasant (who helped raise money for Brown), further fracturing the narrative. It’s then back to the ball via Harpers Ferry and the Civil War. Giovanni then goes back in time to Douglass’s and Lincoln’s childhoods, comparing and contrasting. Lincoln are hosting an inaugural ball and to which Frederick Douglass is an invited guest. A dramatic double-page spread of the Emancipation Proclamation fast-forwards to a March evening in 1865 at the White House, where President and Mrs.
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