Sibert Award 2008 The Wall : Growing Up behind the Iron Curtain Peter Sis (Farrar) review

Sibert Honor Books

• Nic Bishop Spiders by Nic Bishop; photos by the author (Scholastic) review
• Lightship by Brian Floca; illus. by the author (Jackson/Atheneum) review

How the Horn Book reviewed the winners

Peter Sis  The Wall: Growing Up behind the Iron Curtain; illus. by the author
      Farrar
      Reviewed 9/07
The personal meets the political in this absorbing autobiographical picture book from Czech emigre Sis. Born in 1949, just as Czechoslovakia fell under communist rule and Soviet domination, Sis evokes the childhood of a born artist ("as long as he could remember, he had loved to draw") in a country where restrictions on what an artist could do grew along with him, where a child's love for drawing shapes and people was channeled, at school, into drawing tanks and hammer-and-sickles. While the brief main text of each page describes Sis's own experiences ("Slowly he started to question. He painted what he wanted to — in secret"), small captions illuminate the thumbnail pictures of conditions in the country. Strategically accented with red stars and flags, these black ink drawings, sometimes four or six to a page, are almost entirely composed of short, stuttering horizontal pen strokes. The technique is all the more effective for the contrast it allows to Sis's — and Czechoslovakia's — expansive forays into freedom, like the full-color double-page spread depicting the Prague Spring of 1968, which blossoms with images of John Lennon, a Yellow Submarine, and a star-dappled winged horse at the end of a rainbow. The deployment of media choices and color throughout the book is both expert and telling: bold, stark black marker for an invading Soviet tank, dreamy blue crayon for the night the Beach Boys played Prague. It's a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of an era, an artist, and the persistence of the latter in the face of the former. R.S.

Nic Bishop Spiders; illus. with photos by the author
      Scholastic
      Reviewed 3/08
[Review covers Spiders and Frogs] Amazing photographs are the stars of these volumes featuring popular creepy-crawlies. The texts are informative, covering basic anatomical, behavioral, and reproductive facts about frogs and spiders at an appropriate early-elementary level. On each spread, one of the sentences is in larger, colored type, serving as both a highlight of the main ideas and a pointer to the accompanying photograph (which is captioned with additional information). The text, however, is completely overshadowed by the photographs, which are stunningly crisp, colorful, and beautifully reproduced; it is difficult to stop gazing at them long enough to read more than that highlighted sentence (though those who do will find a fascinating depth of information). A close-up of a tarantula is so sharp you can count the individual hairs, and the luminous skin of a frog will have readers reaching out to touch the page. The frogs, in particular, are irresistible, either in close-ups of their faces peering out from the pages or frozen in spectacular mid-jump photos. At the end of each book Bishop explains the extensive work involved in his nature photography, which includes trekking through swamps and woods as well as raising spiders and frogs at home. An index and glossary are appended. D.J.F.

Brian Floca  Lightship; illus. by the author
     Jackson/Atheneum
     Reviewed 5/07
Unlike other ships, which set sail and go interesting places, the job of a lightship is to hold its place at sea. When other ships might try to avoid bad weather, it's the job of a lightship to stay put and "sound their horn so loud the whole ship SHAKES." Without running aground on the shoals of too much or too little information, Floca skillfully details the crew, equipment, and routine for all aboard. He's especially good at working in extra information through pictures with a minimum of words — a dinghy approaches, with a speech balloon saying "Mail's here!" (Speech balloons also catch the authentic flavor of seaboard dialogue, as when a larger ship comes too close and a sailor on the lightship shakes his fist and lets fly with "#@*%&!") The watercolor-and-ink illustrations gracefully depict the beauty of the ocean on both calm and turbulent days as well as the massive vessels the lightship protects, all seen from many perspectives. Endpapers include a cross-section diagram labeling everything from the gin rummy game taking place in the stern to the anchor at the bow, and an author's note at the end explains (in letters too tiny for most child readers) that the last U.S. lightship was retired in 1983, making the present tense of the main text a decidedly odd choice. S.D.L.

2008 ALA awards