Matt de la Peña and Corinna Luyken's Patchwork is an exultant picture book salute to kids who are a little different. And it's no coincidence, the book suggests, that these kids go on to make a difference.
De la Peña, Newbery Medal-winner for Last Stop on Market Street, is at his compassionate best in Patchwork, in which an omniscient narrator spends several pages spotlighting each of five kids and forecasting their futures. "You were blue before you were even born," the narrator observes about a boy who is "blue dressed in blue." But sometimes his "paintbrush at school/ hovers above the pink." (The boy will become an artist.) About a girl who lives to dance, the narrator says, "those rhythms inside your head/ are also a kind of math,/ and one day you will discover coding/ and change the way the world moves." A kid who loves playing ball will become a poet, the class troublemaker will become a teacher and an altruistic child will become a relief worker.
Toward book's end, the narrator says of all the featured kids, "You are blues and pinks and loneliness and laughter,/ mismatched scraps accumulated over time/ and stitched together/ into a kind of patchwork." To reinforce the point, Luyken ( Nothing in Common; The Tree in Me), working in gouache, ink and pencil, first presents each child against a gauzy single-color square; as the kids' horizons expand with the narrator's words, Luyken incorporates additional colors in small boxy shapes, creating shimmery, glowing images that conjure the book's title exquisitely. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author