Spreads move between stately portraiture, mostly of Maathai’s questioners, and broad verdant landscapes, often inhabited by the women empowered by Maathai’s movement. Nelson’s artwork is simply magnificent, employing a multitude of different patterned fabrics with a balance, smoothness, and regularity that makes them resemble cut-paper at times, yet their intricacy never overwhelms the composition. Unfortunately, like Winter’s title, it’s puzzlingly simplistic about Maathai’s achievements, making a significant political figure and academic achiever into a folksy earth mother unlike Rappaport’s picture-book biographies Martin’s Big Words and Abe’s Honest Words (BCCB 1/02 and 10/08), which successfully distill their subjects’ achievements as well as their message into something understandable by the very young, this is an overdilution that’s misleading in its incompleteness.
The text rocks along with storytelling rhythm (a repeated refrain chants of “Thayu nyumba-Peace, my people”) and a peaceful, ennobling dignity, and there’s an empowering focus on one simple action changing the face of a nation. The narrative treats Maathai’s environmental movement by describing it on a personal level, with a sequence of women coming to her to ask for help in situations varying from a lost job to escaping animals to a stream too dirty to drink from in each case she prescribes the planting of the appropriate tree, which will provide food, or fencing, or filtration.
Noted environmentalist Wangari Maathai receives the biographical treatment again (see Jeanette Winter’s Wangari’s Trees of Peace (BCCB 10/08) in this picture book by talented author Napoli.
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