Her Right Foot
by Dave Eggers; illus. by Shawn Harris
Primary, Intermediate    Chronicle    104 pp.
9/17    978-1-4521-6281-2    $19.99

In digressive, idiosyncratic prose, Eggers outlines the history of the Statue of Liberty, gradually leading readers into the detail he’s really interested in — the statue’s right foot, poised as if to take a step. While it takes rather a long time to get there, the book’s point that “the Statue of Liberty is an immigrant, too. And this is why she’s moving” is well made and worthy of attention. However, Eggers clutters up the resonance of his theme with arch posturings (“You have likely heard of a place called France,” begins the book) and twee asides (in teasing us about the statue’s intended destination, Eggers asks, “Is she going to the West Village to look for vintage Nico records?”). Such fatuities surround the interesting facts about the statue’s construction and Eggers’s heartfelt thoughts about its meaning with a sea of banality. While the construction-paper collage illustrations aren’t always stylistically coherent from page to page, individual illustrations are frequently arresting, such as a silhouette portrait of the statue seemingly gliding past a full moon in a salmon-hued sky.

From the November/December 2017 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Save