Carol of the Brown King: Nativity Poems

Amazon.com Review Award-winning illustrator Ashley Bryan noticed that Langston Hughes had written five short children's poems about Christmas--and had translated a sixth "from a Puerto Rican Christmas card." Here Bryan collects and illustrates all six in a beautiful book that will bring out the meaning of the season for African American and other children alike. Bryan has a superb--and characteristically African--color sense, using a saturated palette of ochre, chocolate, russet, and yellow-orange, with a counterpoint of bright blues and greens. The pictures of parents, children, and kneeling Magi are an appropriately vivid, joyful evocation of Hughes's simple cadences: "Three Wise Men / One dark like me / Part of His / Nativity." "They did not travel in an airplane / They did not travel by car / They did not travel on a streamline train / They traveled on foot from afar / They traveled on foot from afar." (Ages 3 to 7)