My Pen

My pen rides dinosaurs and hides an elephant in a teacup.

What can your pen do?

Acclaimed author and illustrator Christopher Myers uses rich black-and-white illustrations to bring a sketchbook to life, showing that with a simple pen, a kid can do anything! Read more Continue reading Read less FROM SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL
K-Gr 3—Aurelio is a young artist with big eyes, a fedora, and, most importantly, a vivid imagination. In ink renderings on pages that maintain interest by alternating between black on white and the perception of the reverse, the boy contrasts the sense of being small—evoked when he sees rich and famous people—with the power he wields with his pen. The "Dali" headline on the book jacket's folded newspaper boat foreshadows playful bits of surrealism, e.g., an elephant in a teacup, a man who looms large on the left page in the hand of a small girl on the right. This tender composition has a familial, personal feeling. The versatile drawing instrument worries about war, expresses love, and "wears satellite sneakers with computer laces." Myers intersperses literal depictions of the pen at work (creating the child's face) with images that are described in more fanciful terms. Where the artist is walking upside down (no pen in sight), the text reads: "My pen tap-dances on the sky and draws clouds with its feet." The first-person possessive voice wears a little thin, and the connection among the pages is loose. Nevertheless, Myers has assembled a visually arresting array of sketches that will likely attract the interest of children who enjoy drawing themselves. Indeed, the last sentence is an invitation to "Let those worlds inside your pen out!" VERDICT The striking images and important message outweigh any narrative issues.—Wendy Lukehart, District of Columbia Public Library ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Myers has exhibited his work at MoMA PS1, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Goethe Institute in Ghana. His illustrations for Harlem, written by his father, Walter Dean Myers, were awarded a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Honor. He has also won Coretta Scott King Honors for Jazz and Black Cat, and he is the critically acclaimed illustrator of Jabberwocky and Love: Selected Poems by E. E. Cummings, as well as the author/illustrator of Fly! Christopher lives in Brooklyn, New York.



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