My Caldecott challenge: Although these Caldecott winner and honor books are not, for the most part, books I’ve read aloud to my son, I still found them interesting. A few I had strong negative opinions of; they show that even books that earned the Caldecott award do become dated!
Shadow by Marcia Brown (1983 Caldecott winner) comes from “conversations with shamans in their villages, from storytellers around the fires in Africa that is passing into memory.” It is a poem first written in French, and I wonder if it made more sense in French.
An Amazon reviewer says it is a book meant to “entrance” and is not for children who need a plot! I’m definitely in the latter category and was looking for a plot. I didn’t like the poem, and while the bright collage artwork with dark shadows is intriguing, the lack of connection between pages quickly made me lose interest in this 1982 Caldecott winner.
