The Patchwork Bike
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
“The words and images in this snapshot story pulse with resourceful ingenuity, joyful exuberance, and layered meanings.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) When you live in a village at the edge of the no-go desert, you need to make your own fun. That's when you and your brothers get inventive and build a bike from scratch, using everyday items like an old milk pot (maybe Mum is still using it, maybe not) and a used flour sack. You can even make a license plate from bark if you want. The end result is a spectacular bike, perfect for whooping and laughing as you bumpetty bump over sand hills, past your fed-up mum and right through your mud-for-walls home. A Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner, this joyous story from Maxine Beneba Clarke, beautifully illustrated by street artist Van Thanh Rudd, is now available as an ebook.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Under a "stretching-out sky at the edge of the no-go desert," a dark brown child with mirrored sunglasses gives readers a tour of a desert village, from "our mud-for-walls home" to "the sand hill we built to slide down." But the best thing? Soaring out into the sand on the bike the kids have created from cans, discarded wood, and "a bell that used to be Mum's milk pot." In her picture book debut, Clarke's lines sing with sound and rhythm, evoking the "shicketty shake" sound of the bike on sand hills. Street artist Rudd's textured paint-and-cardboard collages create a strong sense of a place (the blaze and shadow of the desert) and the people who live there: the narrator's "fed-up mum" in a hijab and robe, and the "crazy brothers" pictured bouncing on a police car, who write "BLM" on the bike's license plate a reference to Black Lives Matter, Rudd notes in an afterword. In an author's note, Clarke writes about her experiences with poverty: "What these times taught me was how to make something out of nothing." Without minimizing the clear references to economic and racial struggle, the words and images in this snapshot story pulse with resourceful ingenuity, joyful exuberance, and layered meanings. Ages 6 9.
