Too much information, and the content will begin to exceed the range of young readers. Picture-book biographies are tricky to get right. There’s expression in these drawings, to be sure, but they may leave some children thinking wistfully of Garth Williams’s pictures for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, which somehow convey emotion and setting more attractively - even without any color at all. Though the illustrations showing Clara and Davie at play outside are more cheerful, Polacco’s characters’ faces often look overly dramatic - the happy ones, slightly manic the sad ones at the point of total despair. She uses pencil very heavily and colors her pages with lots of browns and grays, to dreary effect. Readers may prefer Polacco’s narrative to her trademark illustrations. When Davie breaks both his legs falling from the barn’s roof beam, she attends him, proud when a doctor compliments her, saying, “Well, girly, you did exactly what I would have done.” (Like Amy March in “Little Women,” Clara is allowed to learn at home from then on.) She studies medical books and acts as a veterinarian to the family’s farm animals.
I bet she’ll be breakin’ horses for Pa before we know it!” Later, as Barton grows, she is teased because of her lisp, and returns home from school in tears. When Davie first holds baby Clara, he exclaims: “That’s some grip. She draws faces with great skill: In one scene, the loving look Florence and a young patient - little more than a toddler - exchange as she carries him in her arms conveys something important about the rewards she must have found in nursing, as do the sometimes agonized but mostly adoring expressions of the soldiers she tends as they lie in long rows in cold, dirty military hospitals. She uses a thin black outline for her human figures (whether wounded or healthy, they all resemble Victorian china dolls, with pretty, long-lashed eyes and ruddy cheeks) and then colors the pictures brightly, in some places seeming to use collage for the patterned textiles of Florence’s dresses and for the rich interiors of her family’s houses. But the long description of Nightingale’s life feels a little unadorned and textureless, without a single quotation to give readers a sense of her voice, which must have been an educated and persuasive one, given the extent of what she accomplished (much of it by letter).įortunately, Demi’s illustrations bring great charm to each page, and create a sense of cultural and historical context. Demi’s language is clear, and the story will be comprehensible to older children, who may find the piety, compassion, enterprise and perseverance of "the Lady with the Lamp” inspiring.
Her narrative works hard to cover so much ground - following Nightingale from Italy to England to Germany, Egypt, Turkey and Crimea. In “Florence Nightingale,” Demi, the author and illustrator of many biographical picture books (including “Joan of Arc," “Marco Polo” and “Alexander the Great”), chooses to tell Florence’s story from her birth to her death at the age of 90. Her mother and sister Dolly seem to have suffered from mental illness Clara was raised, in large part, by her brother Davie.
Barton, born on Christmas Day in 1821, was the youngest of five children in a farming family in North Oxford, Mass. They returned to England shortly after, entertaining the beau monde of the day at Embley Park, their estate near London. Nightingale was born in the spring of 1820 to a wealthy British family living in Italy. Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, two great heroines of 19th-century nursing, were born a year apart but in utterly different circumstances.
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