Frida Kahlo: Discover the Artist Behind the Masterpieces (Portrait of an Artist)

PreS-Gr 2-Tailoring her texts to very young readers, Brownridge glosses over Frida Kahlo's physical and marital difficulties and the seriousness of Vincent van Gogh's mental illness and suicide. "Vincent decided that he had had enough of being unwell.... When he died, he could hear the gently rustling corn that had given him so much joy and inspiration." Placing photos of the artworks along with the text on each spread allows the illustrators to be inspired by the style without having to copy it and gives readers a solid idea of the artists' work. These works don't always appear chronologically. The first Kahlo painting shown is What the Water Gave Me (1938), implying it was done early in life rather than well into her career. The back matter offers more information about each image; there are picture credits but no sources, even for direct quotes. Carron's playful, colored pencil illustrations lighten van Gogh's story further. Dieckmann's images, "created with digital and traditional media," capture the surreal effect of many of Kahlo's paintings. Both Carron and Dieckmann have done justice to the artists. VERDICT These gently told narratives are shallow but effective for the audience.-Kathleen Isaacs, Children's Literature Specialist, Pasadena, MD

Brownridge's gloss on Kahlo's dazzling vision and life covers the usual points associated with the artist in straightforward language: "Frida liked to paint lots of outfits or versions of herself in the same picture. She did this to show what it was to feel like lots of different people, all rolled into one body." Combined with Dieckmann's colorful pictures, full of sweet-faced characters and stylized flowers, the resulting biography has the effect of obscuring what's essential about the artist: her rich, fierce, insistent originality. Kahlo's own complicated, seductive, and often troubling paintings, inset in small format as part of the larger illustrations, reveal a fundamental mismatch between her idiosyncratic symbology and this book's simplified approach, which explains magic realism as "objects from real life but with a big sprinkle of Frida's special magic!" Ages 5-7. (Sept.)