I was thrilled to read the Kirkus Review of MAYA LIN: Artist-Architect of Light and Lines, especially this line: "Overall, a fine celebration of a renowned woman artist."
"A concise biography introduces the Chinese-American artist and designer Maya Lin, best known for her architectural plan for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Lin, the child of a ceramic artist and a poet who “had fled China at a time when people were told…how to think,” spends hours as a child playing in the nearby woods and building miniature towns of “paper and scraps.”
Lin is in her last year of college when she enters a competition to design a proposed memorial to Vietnam War veterans, to be built on the National Mall. The design had to include the 58,000 names of those soldiers who had died in Vietnam. Lin’s design was chosen in the anonymous competition but was not without controversy when her name was revealed.
The illustration of the completed memorial focuses on the wall and Lin’s original concept, built into the earth, rising and falling with the landscape, rather than the compromised result, with statues representing soldiers. Phumiruk’s clean-lined, crisp illustrations, done in Photoshop, and light palette emphasize connections between Lin’s concepts and the strong influences of nature on Lin’s art.
The margins of the page containing Harvey’s author’s note about Lin’s work are filled with artists’ and architects’ tools, neatly labeled: ink pens, blueprints, pastels. Harvey provides websites for further information but no specific sources for her work.
Overall, a fine celebration of a renowned woman artist. (Picture book/biography. 4-8)"
Oh! I'm very excited to read the first review of MAYA LIN: Artist-Architect of Light and Lines, published in BOOKLIST and in particular the review stating that this book " "is an artful resource for dreamers of all ages." :
"In 1981, judges selected Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial from 1,421 entries. A senior at Yale University, Lin was just 21. In this introduction to the influential American designer, Harvey portrays Lin’s early inspirations, from the forests and hills of her Ohio hometown and the progressive professions of her parents (her poet mother and clay-artist father, both Chinese immigrants, “never told Maya what to be or how to think”) to “the patterns of light and lines” in buildings at Yale and abroad.
The book also emphasizes Lin’s artistic process, revealing the impetus—a reflective sliver in the earth’s surface—for what would be her first (of many) major works of art, and the mashed potato models, sketches, and backlash that accompanied it.
All the while, the clean lines in Phumiruk’s deliberately sparse, light-infused spreads and the placement of slender, pillarlike passages of text reinforce the breathtaking beauty of Lin’s sleek landmark. With a closing author’s note detailing Lin’s motivations for projects past and present, this is an artful resource for dreamers of all ages. — Briana Shemroske"
Spring 2017 Children's Sneak Previews"
MACMILLAN/HENRY HOLT/CHRISTY OTTAVIANO BOOKS
"Christy Ottaviano Books finds three’s a crowd with Romeo, Juliet and Jim by Larry Schwarz and Iva-Marie Palmer, in which Jim threatens to destroy the romance of star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet by winning Juliet’s heart; Monkey Brother by Adam Auerbach, showcasing the sibling rivalry between a boy and his brother, who happens to be a monkey; Maya Lin: Artist-Architect of Light and Lines by Jeanne Walker Harvey, illus. by Dow Phumiruk, a portrait of the designer of the Vietnam War Memorial; Blooming at the Texas Sunrise Motel by Kimberly Willis Holt, about a girl who attempts to brighten the lives of her cranky grandfather and the residents of his motel by planting a flower garden; and Boy, Stolen by April Henry, the sequel to Girl, Stolen in which Cheyenne sets out to save her former captor." - July 2019
