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Jemmy Button

Amazon.com Price:  $10.63 (as of 09/05/2019 01:19 PST- Details)

Description

A beautiful collaboration in response to a true story.

Exchanged for the single mother-of-pearl button that gave him his nickname, an indigenous Tierra del Fuegan boy named Orundellico spent many years in England in the early 1800s as a part of a failed experiment in forced civilization. Less a biography than an try to represent this alienating experience from Jemmy’s perspective, it’s distinguished by lyrical prose-poetry (“Come away with us and taste our language, see the lights of our world,” the British explorers tell Jemmy) and intensely creative and beautifully conceived paintings. On matte pages, Jemmy, a paper-doll figure with red ochre skin and curly black hair, walks naked through throngs of top-hatted and gowned silhouettes, all of the same shade of blue. His guardians buy him clothes and take him to concerts, but the paintings show him all the time set excluding his companions. “Jemmy felt almost at home. Almost, but not relatively.” As a snapshot of colonial betrayal, it evokes feel sorry about, longing, guilt, and awe–an assortment of feelings that might make the book more attractive to grownups than to children. – Publishers Weekly


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