Kyo Maclear. Scribner, $25 (240p) ISBN 978-1-5011-5420-1
Maclear (Stray Love), a Canadian novelist and children’s author, constructs a literary jewel box into which she places a year’s worth of ramblings collected while urban birding with a Toronto musician turned hobbyist photographer. Her tiny gems of...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Matte Stephens. Kids Can, $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-55453-781-5
Mr. Flux, Maclear (Virginia Wolf) explains in a note, is modeled on George Maciunas, who founded the Fluxus art movement in the 1960s. This story’s Mr. Flux brings change to a boy named Martin and to Martin’s stodgy neighborhood, which has a “fixed...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Katty Maurey. Kids Can, $17.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-894786-35-5
With depth and subtlety, Maclear (Julia, Child) writes about a girl who is taken on vacation to a place she resents, warms to, and learns to love. She’s first seen curled up on her bed. “I do not want to go,” she says. “I want to stay in the city...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Júlia Sardà. Tundra, $16.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-77049-496-1
This gothic-flavored family tale from Maclear (The Good Little Book) puns on the name of the famous composer, but he appears only as a portrait over the household piano. Instead, the members of the Liszt family mostly keep to themselves, making...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Isabelle Arsenault, Kids Can, $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-55337-736-8
Half spoon, half fork, stumpy Spork is the product of a mixed marriage. He
always feels left out at dinnertime, and "after the billionth time he was asked, ‘What are you, anyway?' " he attempts to remake himself. "He put on a bowler hat to look...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Isabelle Arsenault. Kids Can, $16.95 (32p) ISBN 978-1-55453-649-8
It’s not often that a writer-illustrator team conceives a second work so much more ambitious and complex than the first (in this case, 2010’s Spork), and rarer still to execute it so well. In an invented episode from Virginia Woolf’s depression-beset
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Chris Turnham. Chronicle, $16.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-4521-5065-9
A boy named Charles traverses the winter woods in search of a “wish tree,” accompanied by Boggan, his red toboggan. Along the way, they assist friendly animals in need: Charles uses Boggan to transport hazelnuts to Squirrel’s tree, birch logs to...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Kenard Pak. Tundra, $16.99 (48p) ISBN 978-1-77049-492-3
Maclear (The Liszts) and Pak (When the World Is Dreaming) deliver readers to an icy island overtaken by a persistent fog in this haunting but hopeful allegory. On the island, a yellow bird named Warbler observes human visitors through binoculars;...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Esmé Shapiro. Tundra, $18.99 (56p) ISBN 978-1-77049-494-7
Odd-couple friendships are nothing new in children’s literature, but seldom is one portrayed with the grace and sly humor Maclear and Shapiro bring to this story. Much of its appeal is in the personalities that make up this quirky dyad: hulking Yak...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Byron Eggenschwiler. Groundwood, $19.95 (160p) ISBN 978-1-55498-972-0
Taking on friendships, crushes, cliques, and music culture, Maclear offers an honest, deeply respectful look at what is at the core of belonging and isolation for teenagers. Charlie Noguchi narrates her middle-school existence through the lens of...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Rashin Kheiriyeh. Tundra, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-7352-6359-8
Maclear (Operatic) captures in lyrical verse the lives of two young refugees, for whom “here” is a different place every day. In warm, childlike drawings on blue pages, Kheiriyeh (Saffron Ice Cream) portrays a group of people dressed in thick...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Julie Morstad. Harper, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-06-244761-6
The duo behind Julia, Child offers a bold first-person biography of designer Elsa Schiaparelli, beginning with her dreary childhood in Rome, where the bright colors of market flowers brought her joy in a family that dismissed her as ugly....
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Julie Morstad. HarperCollins, $17.99 (48p) ISBN 978-0-06-244762-3
In spare, elegant spreads and graceful prose, frequent collaborators Maclear and Morstad (Bloom) tell the story of Japanese-American illustrator Gyo Fujikawa (1908–1998). An artist from the beginning, “she loved the feel of the pencil in her hand.”...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear. Scribner, $29 (416p) ISBN 978-1-66801-260-4
Novelist Maclear (Birds Art Love) meditates on genealogy and family secrets in this impressive memoir. In 2019, three months after the man who raised her died, Maclear discovered through a DNA test that he was not her biological father. She first...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Katty Maurey. Enchanted Lion, $18.95 (56p) ISBN 978-1-59270-405-7
This gentle meditation on change and memory by prior collaborators Maclear and Maurey (The Specific Ocean) opens with the title phrase, spoken by the work’s child narrator. A gouache painting shows a ghostly image; it’s the young protagonist, seen...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Chris Turnham. Chronicle, $16.99 (44p) ISBN 978-1-4521-3819-0
From distant thunder to clearing skies, a downpour offers plenty to see and do for the star of this story and a dog companion. Heading outside as “umbrellas bloom,” the slicker-clad child gets happier the wetter the day becomes, stomping in puddles...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Nathalie Dion. Tundra, $18.99 (64p) ISBN 978-0-7352-6728-2
Maclear (If You Were a City) writes a tale as light and lilting as its cloud hero. Kumo, whose “only wish was to float unseen,” panics when she’s tapped for cloud duty. She’d strongly prefer not to venture out alone: “What if people point? What if I’
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Gracey Zhang. Random House Studio, $17.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-593-18195-9
Maclear (It Began with a Page) remembers with affection the local bathhouse her Baachan took her to during childhood visits to Japan. In bold black ink and wash drawings, Zhang (Lala’s Words) captures the girl’s arrival and the slow walk through the
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Sanna Francesca. Chronicle, $16.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-452-15519-7
Maclear’s cheerful series of rhymed queries beckons readers to consider the characteristics of an inviting, livable city. On an opening spread, two children with eyes closed ponder the question, “If you were a city,/ how would you be?” as geometric...
READ FULL REVIEW
Kyo Maclear, illus. by Gracey Zhang. Random House Studio, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-0-593-70608-4
Dynamic spreads by Zhang pulse with energy as they capture the casual grace of Japan’s demae—cycling food deliverers—who, from the 1930s to the 1970s, per an end note, balanced stacked trays loaded with “ceramic soup bowls and wooden soba boxes” on...
READ FULL REVIEW
ARTICLES
