City I Love
Starred Review. Kindergarten-Grade 6—A backpack-toting, humble hound with wanderlust and a winged companion tour several of the world's cities. Hopkins's 18 poems observe skyscrapers, hot-dog vendors, subways, taxis, bridges, bright lights, and the diversity of people and pigeons. Most of the poems span a fully illustrated spread, and youngsters will have fun finding the dog and bird on each one. Hopkins honors children's lyrical sense of music ("Sing a song of cities/if you do,/Cities will sing back/to you") and earnest astonishment ("Look!/Up there!/High up there/where/men and women/building the new skyscraper/balance on beams/dangle on derricks/glide on girders…Wondrous!"). In Paris, a mother pigeon pleads with the traffic to be quiet: "Please/city/have/some/pity./Promise me/not/ one/more/beep?/My newborn/pigeons/need/their/sleep." These polished poems are equally matched by Hall's graphic-style cartoons, which offer many added layers of narrative delight as well as beautiful colors and an eye-catching sense of design. The watercolor endpapers show a map with major cities highlighted in the poems. The illustrations have a cosmopolitan look, a little French with a splash of nostalgia. They are filled with construction-buildings, bridges, pyramids-a kind of hats-off to the magnificence of the world. This book is really special, a global tour de force.—Teresa Pfeifer, Alfred Zanetti Montessori Magnet School, Springfield, MACopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.