An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children
Description
A unique collaboration from two of America’s leading artists that explores the fascinating and hidden history of the plant world.
In this witty, deeply original book, the renowned novelist Jamaica Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world and reveals the often brutal history behind them.
Kara Walker, one of America’s greatest visual artists, illustrates each entry with provocative, brilliant, enthralling, many-layered watercolors.
There has never been a book like An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children—so inventive, surprising, and telling about what our gardens reveal.
Praise for An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children
"In collaborating with the fiercely imaginative visual artist Kara Walker, Kincaid has transposed this mode of thinking into an amalgam of erudition, discourse, storytelling and picture book art. A simple child’s garden of ABCs their “encyclopedia” is not. Kincaid’s adult base, too, will gravitate toward it . . . Cunning and often anthropomorphic, the alphabet book’s imagery interpolates child-driven versions of [Walker's] acidly sardonic shadow art with soft-edged, watercolor-drenched vignettes that play hide-and-seek with the letters they’re called on to represent . . . Kincaid and Walker are unafraid to spin the world differently and make it matter in new ways." —Celia McGee, The New York Times Book Review