When Marian Sang: The True Recital of Marian Anderson

Rating:
Summary: One of my favorites for my own classroom!
Review: When this book first came out, I was ecstatic that someone took the time to make the life of Marian Anderson accessible to children. Too often classical singers of the Civil Rights era are overlooked and forgotten. The combination of the gorgeous illustrations and lovely text make this book exceptional. Although not the easiest book for children to read on their own, as a read-aloud in a classroom setting, it can make an incredible impact. It is an excellent book to incite discussion on many subjects and it truly inspires children to pursue their dreams despite the troubles they may face.
The timeless lyrics interwoven within the story comment wonderfully on Marian's life and the perseverance with which she dealt with her struggles. The beauty of this book is that it focuses on the accomplishments of her life and the overcoming of disappointments, not the actual disappointments themselves. This lack of sensationalism gives the book dignity. This is definitely one book that I will treasure and hope to share many times over with students in my own classroom.

Rating:
Summary: Good drawings, very poor text
Review: While the artwork illustrating this book is beautiful, the text is sorely lacking, being at the same time both too complex and too narrow, besides being confined by the device of using song lyrics to illustrate Anderson's life and feelings.
The text is overly long, and some concepts in the book are more complicated than needed, such as specifying that "the Department of Interior of the United States invited Marian" and "teachers ... marched ... in front of the Board of Education" to an age group which is grappling with the concept that our country is the United States of America. The report of the actual concert at the Memorial is short. There's no discussion of how the concert, the controversy surrounding it, and Anderson herself may have influenced the country's views on civil rights. The author uses the word "Negro" to refer to Anderson's race; that term was appropriate in 1939, but not now.
The afterword by the illustrator is just silly, since he spends much of his time telling us how his uncle knew both Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson, until he gets to the end of his afterword and says, paraphrased, "just kidding -- my uncle made it up!" The illustrator continues this joke at our expense by making his absent, lying uncle a primary character in the drawing of the audience at the Lincoln Memorial.
The afterword ("Encore") by the author is helpful, as are the suggestions for further reading and viewing.
The theme of Ryan's book is that Anderson fulfills her girlhood dream of singing at the Met, and is the first African American to do so. Everything else is essentially an incident along that road. There's more to Anderson's life than that.
The main flaw of this book is that the text uses too-complex terms to convey a story which is paradoxically too simple. It leaves out important parts of Anderson's life, such as her first "flopped" concert in New York, and her life after the Met. There are other books which provide more reality, and/or a more child-oriented text (such as Patricia and Fredrick McKissack's _Marian Anderson: A Great Singer_). Click on "see more about me" above for a review of and link to McKissack's book.