About the Author:
Brian Pinkney is the illustrator of many acclaimed books for children, including Alvin Ailey, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald. He has received Caldecott Honors for Duke Ellington and The Faithful Friend, and a Coretta Scott King Award for In the Time of the Drums. Brian Pinkney lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and frequent collaborator, Andrea Davis Pinkney, and their children.
From Booklist:
*Starred Review* Gr. 4-6. "Sometimes, a flame can be utterly extinguished. / Sometimes, a flame can shrink and waver, but / sometimes a flame refuses to go out . . . So burns the Light of the Jewish people." Mixing soul-searing facts with imagined voices, and using a stone lamp as a link between events and the people who lived them, Hesse captures the tragedies and hopes of the Jews. Each night of Hanukkah, a light is lit. Here, each light commemorates a sad event--the Crusades, the Inquisition, the appearance of the False Messiah, the pogroms, the assassination of Rabin--which is described on a full-page and framed with words from the Bible. Then, Hesse personalizes those happenings by writing movingly in free verse from the standpoint of a child who has lived the disappointment, the discrimination, and the hatred emanating from the experience. A child during the Russian pogrom of 1883 nurses her brutally beaten father and watches as her brother slips away to join a revolution. In Austria, after Kristallnacht, a boy unmakes his little sister's snowman, knowing that even "small joy" is forbidden to Jews. If it is sometimes hard to find the hope in the poignant words, Pinkney's paintings are more optimistic. Even when the faces are sad, the glow from the stars, moonlight, and the candles of the stone lamp somehow belie the world's cruelty. Find out more about this illuminating work in the Story behind the Story on the opposite page. Ilene Cooper
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