It first starts off with the birds in Africa and the narrator mentions that the birds have never seen a black feathered bird.

This book took place in Africa and it talks about a group of birds of all the colors on a rainbow that have never seen a black feathered bird. The Beautiful Blackbird was written with a narrator as the point of view and some dialogues from the other characters at times. when you were reading them? I definitely didn’t until reading the Beautiful Blackbird and realizing the hidden message behind the words. When you were younger did you ever notice a moral of a picture book, chapter book, etc. But the end result, in which the other birds only consider themselves beautiful after Blackbird shares some of his blackness with them, is hardly the universal story of 'appreciating one's heritage and discovering the beauty within,' as claimed by the dust-jacket blurb.īlack Is Beautiful! But I don't think I'd be comfortable handing a child a book whose implicit message is that it is the only kind of beautiful. It's easy to see why he would be tempted to do so: for many years, black was rarely depicted as a 'good' color, rarely described as beautiful, or associated with the positive, making a story with a different viewpoint very appealing. I understand that Bryan took some liberties with the original tale, which was more of a condemnation of vanity - the other birds being more concerned with how they look, than how they behave - than an affirmation of self esteem. Unfortunately, the narrative of Beautiful Blackbird wasn't as appealing as the illustrations. The inclusion of images of the artist's scissors - which once belonged to his mother - on the decorated endpapers, is a particularly nice touch. Created using a cut-paper collage technique, it is colorful and immediate, with a sense of motion that suits the rhythmic narrative. The artwork is just gorgeous, and fully deserved the Coretta Scott King Illustrator's Award that it received. His many folktale adaptations, in particular, have been tempting me of late, so I am especially disappointed that Beautiful Blackbird - supposedly a retelling of a traditional tale from the Ila-speaking people of Zambia - didn't impress me more.įirst though, the good news: this is a beautiful book, visually speaking. With over thirty children's books to his name, many of them award-winning explorations of the African-American experience, Ashley Bryan is an author whose work I have long wanted to read.

Beautiful Blackbird by Ashley Bryan