From School Library Journal
Grade 2-4–Long has taken a portion of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and used it as a text for a picture-book story. His lush, realistic, single- and double-page paintings illuminate the tale of a boy who is taken to an academic lecture, becomes bored, and walks out alone to look at the night sky. Line drawings by Long's two sons accompany the text of the poem: "When I heard the learn'd astronomer;/When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;/When I was shown the charts and the diagrams,/to add, divide, and measure them…How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;/Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,/In the mystical moist night-air,/and from time to time,/Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars." Whitman's words, like the pictured astronomy lecture, are not well suited to young readers. A far better introduction to the poet, designed for children old enough to begin to understand his work, is Jonathan Levin's wonderful
Poetry for Young People: Walt Whitman (Sterling, 1997).
–Kathleen Whalin, York Public Library, ME Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
*Starred Review* K-Gr. 3. When last we saw Long's gorgeous acrylic paintings, they were singing backup for Madonna in
Mr. Peabody's Apples (2003). Now the artist turns his attention to another era's brash individualist. Unlike this season's biography of Walt Whitman by Barbara Kerley, reviewed on p.577, Long's story-in-images makes a fine introduction for very young children. His interpretation of Whitman's eight-line rebuke of stuffy pragmatism tells a familiar story: A little boy obsessed with outer space has been dragged to an astronomy lecture. Unable to make sense of the speaker's pontifications, the fidgety youngster takes his toy rocket ship outside, where he marvels at the "perfect silence of the stars, casting a decisive vote for creative speculation over chilly analysis." The painterly artwork, as controlled as the logical, grown-up world it portrays, gets its own injection of childlike wonder through playful doodles contributed by Long's two children, and it's so convincingly reproduced that many scribble-wary librarians will do a double take. Although the brooding tone of both the poem and the art makes this a less carefree entree to transcendentalism than D. B. Johnson's
Henry Hikes to Fitchburg (1999), children will easily relate to the boy's crushing boredom, while adults will smile at the parents' overzealous efforts to nourish his passions.
Jennifer MattsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
