In Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker, Patricia Hruby Powell has created a picture book unique in the vast genre for its poetic grace in bringing an historical figure to brilliant life on the page. Christian Robinson deserves much acclaim for his vibrant illustrations, which pop with color and magically convey a feeling of music and movement. Pick up this book and prepare to be transported in time through Baker’s life.
As soon as you pick up this book, it’s obvious that it isn’t a typical picture book from its heft alone. Coming in at 104 pages, it includes pages with and without illustrations, and the text is laid out in verse form. The occasional word is written in all caps, emphasizing important events, places, and experiences in Baker’s life and relevant to the time of racial segregation. Quotes from Baker are interspersed and printed in a flowing cursive type, so that even pages with no illustrations have an interesting visual element in the text layout and type, with curves and breaks that draw the eye.
Broken into six sections, this inspiring book details Josephine Baker’s life from her birth in 1906 in Saint Louis, Missouri, through her adolescence and adult life spent entertaining through performances across the country and throughout Europe, all the way to her death in 1975. Readers will get a well-researched account of the challenges she faced as a black performer in a time when segregation was the law of the land, and her spirit and determination come through in her actions and words. Not only a performer, but an avid champion of civil rights, Baker’s turn as a spy for France during World War II is even briefly documented here!
Perhaps some children will be most drawn to the details of Josephine Baker’s role as a mother to twelve children she and her husband adopted from all around the world. Dubbing her family a “rainbow tribe,” Baker lived what she believed, honoring each child’s national origin and raising them in their own religions, as well.
“We’ll show the world that racial hatred is unnatural… Children of different races can grow up together as brothers.”
Seeing really is believing, and to get even a hint of this book’s beauty and tone, please watch the publisher’s trailer below. Then promptly get to a bookstore or library and put this book in your hands. I’m recommending it for slightly older children, in the 2nd/3rd grade and up age group. With complex themes of segregation, race-based mistreatment and challenges, poverty, and death, there is plenty of fodder for important conversations, and hopefully children will come away from this book with an understanding and respect for the incredible woman who was Josephine Baker.