Africa Calling

The Book Report

AFRICA CALLING NIGHTIME FALLING is a gem --- an interesting snapshot of an exotic place. --- by Kelly Milner Halls (BookpgDino), for THE BOOK REPORT

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A young girl imagines a series of scenarios involving African animals set against a quasi-collage backdrop. Ages 4-7. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 2A sense of realism combines with the delights of fantasy in this charming picture book. The illustrations of animals in their African environments move from lions in a brilliant sunset on the plains; to a viper in the deepening desert dusk; to monkeys in the starry jungle's darkness; to the rhinoceros and stalking cheetah on the grasslands before showing a moonlit scene of a child at home, in bed, surrounded by her stuffed animals. The double-page pictures were created from a watercolor base with added collage layers of painted figures and leaves, stones, dried flowers, and twine. The use of collage communicates a world of fantasy on the edge of dreaming, at the same time that the concreteness of the materials used and the dimensionality created by varying distances from the background make this world seem very real. Some of the featured animals are stylized torn-paper figures, while others are realistically detailed. A simple rhyming text accompanies each illustration: "Suspicious of each passing stranger,/ Buffalo looks for signs of danger./ Cautiously eyeing/ Buffalos spying." With a theme reminiscent of Ann Jonas's The Quilt (Greenwillow, 1984), the author and illustrator have created a mysterious, nonthreatening animal world of a child's imagination.Loretta Kreider Andrews, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, MD