Frequent collaborators Barnett and Klassen serve up a delectable rendition of the oft-retold folktale. The bare-bones narrative “clip clops” along with abundant humor and plenty of verbal delights, repetition, and rhyme (“Who seeks to reach the grassy ridge? / Who dares to walk across my bridge?”) as the brash, blustery bully of a troll gleefully lists all the ways he loves to eat goat.
In this expansive queer tale that marries historical fiction with inventive world-building based on Jewish folklore, a demon called Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) and an angel who takes on different names but is eventually known as Uriel set off from Shtetl, a tiny village in the Pale of Settlement, to the U.S., as many young people are doing around the same time (cued as the early twentieth century).
Chin follows his acclaimed Your Place in the Universe (rev. 11/20) with an equally stellar exploration of the tiniest components of matter conceptualized by science. The book opens with a brown-skinned child who uses a wheelchair visiting a Southwestern desert. The United States’ smallest bird, butterfly, and bee, in turn, alight on her finger, in close-ups that ultimately zoom in to a hair on that finger and put in motion a journey inward to the “building blocks” of biology and physical science.
“You are you, and I am I. We are people…This makes us different from most of the things on Earth.” Head crowned with a mass of brown curly hair, this...