Chil­dren’s

Ein­stein

Cor­rine Maier; Anne Simon, illus.
  • Review
By – March 23, 2017

This graph­ic nov­el biog­ra­phy of Albert Ein­stein takes the read­er through the jour­ney of his life, from the issues he had as a boy in school, to his strange young adult­hood, to the sage he became lat­er in life. This is the third graph­ic biog­ra­phy for this team, hav­ing paired up before to write and illus­trate graph­ic biogra­phies of Freud and Marx. The graph­ic biog­ra­phy for­mat of this book will be appeal­ing to read­ers of many ages. The col­ors of the illus­tra­tions are mut­ed and earth-toned which suits the sto­ry of Einstein’s life. There is good artis­tic use of the entire page cre­at­ing visu­al inter­est which imme­di­ate­ly catch­es the reader’s eye. There are ref­er­ences to some of the big­ger” ques­tions that filled Einstein’s life and to the dif­fi­cult time he had with rela­tion­ships as well. There is also won­der­ful use of point-of-view as, at times, Ein­stein, him­self, address­es the read­er. This is an engag­ing tech­nique, draw­ing the read­er into the sto­ry. This is an inter­est­ing and unusu­al for­mat in which to learn about the life of a Jew­ish leg­end and is rec­om­mend­ed for ages 12 and up.

Deb­bie Fed­er is cur­rent­ly the Direc­tor of the LRC at Ida Crown Jew­ish Acad­e­my in Chica­go. She has her Mas­ters in Library and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence from Domini­can Uni­ver­si­ty. She has spent more than ten years intro­duc­ing chil­dren and young adults to lit­er­a­ture and infor­ma­tion lit­er­a­cy at schools and pub­lic libraries. She is the author of Jel­ly Bean’s Art Muse­um Adven­ture and is hon­ored to have been a mem­ber of the Syd­ney Tay­lor Book Award Committee.

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