Carmine's Story
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Cover Story
This issue’s cover is from The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Poetry (cover illustration by Peter Weevers). Edited by Alison Sage (who also edited The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature), this sumptuous anthology is loosely divided into four sections corresponding to age starting with nursery rhymes and first poems through to poems for older children and classic poetry. Poems from such modern poets as Roger McGough, Ted Hughes, Wendy Cope and Maya Angelou sit alongside poems by Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley and Shakespeare. The anthology is illustrated in full colour and black and white. Newly commissioned illustrations from, for example, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes and Nicola Bayley are included alongside illustrations by Randolph Caldecott, Jessie Willcox Smith and Kate Greenaway. With such a comprehensive range of poems for 2-11 year olds and upwards, this is a wonderful family book.
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Carmine's Story
Carmine is a ten-year-old boy with AIDS. He has never known life without a constant round of hospital visits, medication, and the loneliness of isolation. Living with his grandmother in New York City, he gets supportive care from her and a number of professional helpers. A very serious child looks out of the black and white photographs in this picture book, and his history - told in the first person - is bleak but without a trace of self-pity. He knows he is dying; he knows his mother died of AIDS, and two other members of the family have it too. This family's tragedy must be repeated world-wide time and again, and the strength of the book is in our getting to know one sufferer so intimately. It is not a happy story, and is made sadder still by the 'epilogue' which tells us that Carmine died in 1996. As this is an American publication, the bibliography and list of addresses will be of little use to British readers. The book is distributed by Turnaround (0181 829 3000) in the UK.
