kirkusreviews.com
A little girl steps into a piece of art and connects to a
musician and artist from Hispaniola in a second book about the young girl’s
introduction to different cultures (Sofi
in the Magic, Musical Mural / Sofi y el mágico mural musical, 2015).
After Sofi is unable to create the color purple for art
class, she leaves school frustrated. On her walk home, she finds a painter
working in a nearby garden. Touching a painting, she finds herself meeting two
important artists: Dominican Afro-Latin singer and composer Juan Luis Guerra
and Haitian sculptor Guerlande Balan. Sofi helps Guerra finish the lyrics to a
song and then makes a perfect purple to assist Balan with a statue. The book
features blocks of text, English followed by Spanish, over mostly double-page
spreads of Sofi’s adventure. While the story serves as a primer on some Haitian
and Dominican terms and cultural touchstones, there’s not much to learn about
Sofi herself, and the text doesn’t always rise to the occasion in either
language. When she’s asked how she figured out how to make purple, Sofi says
only and unsatisfyingly, “I guess I always knew. I just needed a little help
from my friends.” What the book gets right is its advocacy for the power of
art, even art that may seem out of reach at first.
Author Ortiz has a background in museums and
making them more accessible, and in her work she makes a strong case for making
those connections. (Bilingual picture book. 5-10)
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