Raschka's colorful rectangular shapes form the myriad portraits of African-American girls and at timesįrame their heads with wondrous halos. Potent politically, because ''Girlpie hair'' scans both as an adjective and the noun it modifies and as what it's meant to be: ''the hair of Girlpie.'' There was an ancillary outcryĪgainst Carolivia Herron's ''Nappy Hair'' - that her text was laced with ''ebonics.'' Perhaps ''Happy to Be Nappy'' is a kind of call and response to the callĪnd response of ''Nappy Hair.'' The text appears in a childlike kind of curling cursive script. Opening line, ''Girlpie hair smells clean and sweet,'' to its very last image, ''Happy to Be Nappy'' is a richly colorful and jazzy debunking of such devaluation. Hooks has always been concerned with what she calls ''the politics of representation that systematically devalues blackness.'' From its Praise-song for nappy hair, marvelously illustrated by Chris Raschka. Now the esteemed and prolific African-American feminist writer Bell Hooks has upped the ante, so to speak, with her first children's book, HAPPY TO BE NAPPY, a glorious T's almost exactly a year since controversy about a white teacher's classroom use of a book called ''Nappy Hair'' in a publicĮlementary school in Brooklyn forced her transfer. Jump at the Sun/Hyperion, $14.99 ages 4 to 8
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