World More Beautiful: The Life and Art of Barbara Cooney
by Angela Burke Kunkel; illus. by Becca Stadtlander
Primary    Random House Studio/Random    40 pp.
8/24    9780593484388    $19.99
Library ed.  9780593484395    $22.99
e-book ed.  9780593484401    $11.99

From the Brooklyn hotel room in which she was born to the Maine coast where she spent many years, Barbara Cooney (1917–2000) sought color and light, which Kunkel adopts as her leitmotif. Cooney’s merchant father’s fondness for “numbers ticking steadily away in black and white” is contrasted with her artist mother’s encouragement to create, and with the vibrancy and freedom of Maine, where the family summered. Working as an illustrator, Cooney was initially confined to black and white, dutifully plying the scratchboard “because there [were] houses to heat and children to feed.” Taking her subject’s simplicity of prose as a model, Kunkel does not name Cooney’s oeuvre, instead matter-of-factly folding in references to it. In one spread Cooney is transfixed by the beauty of a rooster; in the next, she creates illustrations for what readers may recognize as the Caldecott-winning Chanticleer and the Fox. Liberated by its “huge success,” Cooney traveled widely, Miss Rumphius–like, “soaking up sun, and color, and light” and eventually settling in Maine. Directly echoing Miss Rumphius, Kunkel tells readers that “there [was] still one thing [Cooney] must do”: raise money to build a new library in her adopted hometown. Working in gouache, Stadtlander emulates the illustrator’s flat, folk art–esque style, her palette and compositions harmonizing with Cooney’s. Her penultimate spread depicts an adult reading Miss Rumphius to a child, making the connection between author and creation in quiet affirmation of the titular “world more beautiful.” Appended with an author’s note, a brief bibliography, and an afterword by Cooney’s daughter.

From the ">November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.