A review by crystal_reading
Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building by Christy Hale

5.0

The thought that went into this book amazes me. The book highlights some amazing architecture. What sets the book apart though, is that for every structure, there is a mixed media illustration of young children creating a similar structure with everyday materials such as stacking cubes, legos, mud or even the cardboard tubes from paper towel rolls. There is also a concrete poem that also speaks of the children's creations while it gives the reader another way to imagine or "see" the shapes that make up the two structures. There are four layers to the book: the photographs, the artist's illustrations, the text, and the shape of the text. Tracing the many shapes was a lot of fun and young readers will want to get out their building materials and get to it. This was also a multicultural work. The authors chose works from all over the world and there is a diverse group of young people in the illustrations. I was glad to see that there was a mix of both boys and girls too.

Sometimes as an adult reading to a young child, I wish that the authors provided more information in simple non-fiction texts. Happily, I discovered that there are fantastic endnotes. They included brief, but interesting biographies of the architects and details about each work of architecture. Two of the fourteen were female, but there is a gender imbalance in that profession so this may just be a reflection of that reality. I loved this book and will definitely be adding it to our collection to inspire our future engineers and architects.

Original review http://readingtl.blogspot.com/2013/05/picture-book-party.html