From Publishers Weekly
Myerss (
Sunrise over Fallujah) and Steptoes (
In Daddys Arms I Am Tall) concept, recasting
Swan Lake as hip-hop, may sound unlikely, but in their hands it largely succeeds: the ultra-cool, emotionally hot setting gives the story new power. Swan Lake is a housing project, Rothbart represented as Big Red, a drug lord, and Odette an addict; Amiri tries to save her, but fails. Myerss words carry the force of blows; Steptoes collages teem with bodies colliding and overlapping. The language swings from pop lyric to Shakespearean, sometimes in the same breath: Amiri, be my man!/ Save me if you can!/ If not, let my last pure breath/ Pledge my love to you in wretched death. Steptoe gets gritty, working directly on slabs of asphalt, a street effect intensified by the graffiti-like use of multicolored and multisize fonts in the text. His figures are shadowed with ghostly blue; they leap, ward off blows, embrace, argue. Its easy to imagine them as dancers. The momentum yields at the end, where, in contrast to the stark immediacy of the rest of the work, abstract language softens the tragic conclusion. Ages 12–up.
(Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Grade 7 Up—Born from Myers's musings on the underlying violence in
Swan Lake, this story is a riff on that ballet with tones of
West Side Story, Shakespeare, and hip-hop. In the projects, Amiri's mom is going to throw him a party in the hope that he'll find the right girl and settle down. But that night on the courts, Amiri meets Odette—and though she is promised to Big Red, a crack dealer, they proclaim their love. "And thus the pact is set, the bargain sealed,/Both agony and love revealed./But are solutions so easily discovered?/Happy endings so readily recovered/Among the castaways and rejects/Of the teeming Swan Lake Projects?/Is happy chance alone gladly greeted/And Big Red so easily defeated?" There follows the evil twin, the betrayal, the forgiveness, the fight—and a happier ending than in most versions of the ballet. Myers's verse is almost overwrought—as it should be to suit the story, and the intensity of teenage love. The melodrama combines with an energy and beat that—heightened by dynamic text design—makes this ideal for performance. Steptoe's collage-on-cinderblock illustrations have a roughness, darkness, and density that suit the tone. This selection will broaden any teen collection.—
Nina Lindsay, Oakland Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
