Viva Frida

by Yuyi Morales and Tim O'Meara

Yuyi Morales’s playful, lush, elegant, heartfelt picture book about artist... read more

Yuyi Morales’s playful, lush, elegant, heartfelt picture book about artist Frida Kahlo concludes with an author’s note titled “My Frida Kahlo,” which begins: “When I think of Frida Kahlo, I think of orgullo, pride. Growing up in Mexico, I wanted to know more about this woman with her mustache and unibrow. Who was this artist who had unapologetically filled her paintings with old and new symbols of Mexican culture in order to tell her own story?” The note itself is an informative and loquacious conclusion to a work that is linguistically spare, visually complex and delightful, and emotionally rich and stirring. Morales’s illustrations combine photographs of three-dimensional tableaus she created featuring handcrafted puppets representing factual elements of Kahlo’s life, including the child–friendly details of Kahlo’s pet deer and monkey, and paintings that reference Kahlo’s own work and represent elements of Kahlo’s vivid creative life as expressed through her art. The bilingual text is a series of simple statements in Kahlo’s voice, which concludes, “I love / and create / and so / I live!” (Ages 4–9)

© Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2015

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