Alma y cómo obtuvo su nombre

Tejas Star Award Winner; Caldecott Honor 2019

Image:

Justification: I selected Alma y cómo obtuvo su nombre by Juana Martinez-Neal as my Tejas Star award winner for it's beautiful message about the importance of family, familial history, and what goes into a name. I appreciate that Juana Martinez-Neal is both author and illustrator of this appealing book and she was a recipient of the Caldecott for her illustrations. The author developed this story based on her own experience as a Peruvian immigrant. She encourages readers to think about their own history of their name. She offers up an invitation to her readers to tell their own story.

Evaluation: In this origin story, Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela thinks she has way too many names! Her names don't even fit onto a sheet of paper and she hilariously needs to append to fit her entire name. Alma consults her Papi for answers about her long, long name and Papi shows her photo albums of her ancestors. The reader is transported into the world of Alma's ancestors as the story features Sofia, Esperanza, José, Pura, and Candela and how both their relationship and the stories and histories of their lives influenced Alma's name. Beautifully, Alma recognizes traits in each of her elders that she can identify with, further endearing and connecting her to her name.

The illustrations are dominated by grey and white renderings with soft, sparse, muted colors in candy-striped pinks and blues. The drawings were developed using both graphite and colored pencils. Martinez-Neal's images help to both enhance and develop the plot of the story as we step back through history to learn about Alma's ancestors. While much of the book is achromatic in varying shades of grey, this style of illustration is peppered with cool pastel pinks and soft blues. The shape of Alma is round and almost ball-like lending an accessible, warm-fuzzy quality to the images. The curves in Martinez-Neal's drawings are organic and her rounded shapes convey an exuberance and joy.

Alma y cómo obtuvo su nombre reads almost like looking at a photo album. This lends a self-referential quality to the book as the reader is looking a renderings of photo albums pulled down off the shelf by Alma's father. This meta quality is quite inventive and the readers becomes entranced by the story within the story. Martinez-Neal also innovatively uses color to delineate between the past and present tense in her book. Images from the past are largely achromatic and the pops of pinks and blues characterize Alma and her father in the present tense.

Conclusion: This origin story reveals much about Alma's family history and the storytelling through visual images displays to the reader how she becomes connected to her name.

APA Reference: Martinez-Neal, J. (2018). Alma y como obtuvo su nombre = Alma and how she got her name, Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press.