Children's Book Review: Little Frida by Anthony Browne

I am currently taking a class on Frida Kahlo so I could not resist when I saw this book.

Frida Kahlo has been "a thing" in the art and marketing environments for a number of years now and it seems as though the powers that be have determined that our kids should be included in this phenomenon. Mattel has offered a Frida Kahlo Barbie Doll to market and now Walker Books is introducing a Children's Picture Book titled Little Frida which was authored and illustrated by Anthony Browne.

Anthony Browne is a British writer and illustrator of children's books with fifty books to his credit. He won the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2000 for his lasting contribution as a children's illustrator and two Kate Greenaway Medals from the Library Association recognizing the year's best children's book illustrator.

Anthony grounded this effort in  Frida's lived experience as a child. According to the book's inside back cover:

Around the time she had polio, when she was about 6 years old, Frida invented an imaginary friend who could dance without limping. In her diary, she described her first meeting with this companion, from flying through a door she drew on her window, and descending into the earth under the dairy, to sharing secrets with a friend who danced and laughed without making a sound.

The book opens with a poignant first page which describes Frida contracting polio, the physical pain in the aftermath, and the emotional pain from the other kids calling her "peg leg." She was the other. The associated illustration is very Frida with animated cacti dancing with up-thrust arms on an earth whose surface is rent with deep gashes. And there is Frida in her Mexican outfit, flowers in her hair, and one leg markedly different from the other. The sun is low in the sky and casts a long shadow. The houses of the village are in the background.

The illustrations in this book are magnificent, either hewing to a Frida painting or looking like something that Frida would have done. One of his illustrations is of Frida dreaming of piloting a plane: her fuselage is a pear; the nose cone is one-third of an orange; the wings are the bottom halves of two bananas with each end pointing in opposite directions; the front landing gear is represented by two cherries while the rear is represented by a single grape; strawberries and a water melon make up the tail assembly. A parrot is the co-pilot. This is not surreal; it is sur-fruity.

Another two-page illustration shows the gashed earth with mountains in the background. The sun (early Diego) is bright orange on the right page with a shimmering silver moon on the left. Way in the distance, as Frida runs across the rent earth, is a dairy. Frida crawls through a door into the dairy and falls down a pink tunnel which has either two red ribbons, or two blood tracks, along the side; again, evocative of the adult Frida.

And then she meets this girl -- the imaginary friend -- who is wearing clothing that tags the illustration as a precursor of the Frida Kahlo painting titled The Two Fridas. And then they sit and it is a "mini-me" version of The Two Fridas as they join one set of hands and, in the other, hold opposite ends of a string which is colored 1/2 red and 1/2 white.

Frida flies back home to a blue house whose courtyard is bedecked with flowers of all types and colors.

The final illustration has Frida drawing an eye on a notepad. The background is filled with all kind of trees and leaves upon which the Frida Kahlo menagerie roams.

This is a great book. It has a storyline that will appeal to the kids but also has a sophisticated Kahlo presentation which will appeal to the parent who will be reading the book to the child.

@EverythingElse238