The Songwriting, Hit-Singing, Guitar-Picking Dolly Parton
August 15, 2022
A title brimming with love for a favorite country music star. Given Dolly Parton's philanthropic efforts with Imagination Library, it's especially fitting to see her profiled by a writer and an illustrator who have ample experience creating picture-book biographies for young readers. Slade's text includes quotes from Parton and adopts a down-home voice for the narration as she returns to Dolly's Tennessee roots to tell her rags-to-riches coming-of-age story. Throughout, Fotheringham's digital illustrations ground the text with a realistic style that never caricatures the singer, who has frequently been subjected to mockery over her appearance. While the book focuses mainly on Parton's youth and the very beginnings of her career with her early radio performances and an appearance at the Grand Ole Opry at 13, backmatter gives more detail about her successes and discusses how Parton has used her fame and fortune to help others. Fotheringham incorporates symbols and motifs (butterflies and red shoes, for example) that are important to Parton's career or figure prominently in her lyrics, which will delight those familiar with her catalog. Background characters are racially diverse. (This book was reviewed digitally.) A new generation will understand why we will always love this iconic singer/songwriter. (Picture book. 3-7)
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August 1, 2022
Grades 2-5 The tale of Dolly Parton's rise to fame is one of rags to riches, in which a resourceful and determined young girl is able to make it big. This biography engagingly recounts her childhood growing up in a one-room cabin as one of a dozen children. Dolly is inspired by her surroundings and hears music everywhere, from her mom snapping beans to geese flying overhead honking. She refurbishes a discarded mandolin and starts writing songs. Her first stage is the porch, where she plays for farm animals with a tin-can microphone. From there, she makes it to the local radio and then the Grand Ole Opry at just 13 years old. She keeps her dream of becoming a star through high-school graduation, after which she hops on a bus to Nashville. Readers will find a lot of charm here, and the illustrations bring one back to the period, into the rural Tennessee mountains and ultimately to the big city, where Dolly finally finds fame.
COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
October 3, 2022
Free verse peppered with Southern dialect and colloquialisms reads like a ballad of Dolly Parton’s perseverance on her rise to stardom in this spirited picture book biography. As a child in a “newspaper-pasted-over-drafty-walls poor” family, Dolly Parton makes music with a homemade guitar and tin can microphone, but when her uncle books her on a live radio show, “big-dreamin’ Dolly/ FROZE—/ barely able to breathe.” Never one to back down, Dolly stands up to the “stage-fright bully” and fights for her dream of being a Nashville star. Slade’s alliterative, rhythmic lines dynamically resonate with the book’s subject. Focusing on Dolly, portrayed throughout wearing pops of red, Fotheringham’s digitally rendered artwork leaves backgrounds sketchy and muted for contrast, an apt visual metaphor for the biography’s “dazzlin’ ” subject. Back matter includes “More About Dolly.”
Ages 7–10.