Monica Brown, illustrated by Raul Colon,
My Name Is Gabito: The Life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez/Mi Llamo Gabito: La Vida De Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Luna Rising, 2007

Ages 4-10

The third in Monica Brown's My Name is series (and the only one written in the third-person) celebrates the childhood of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a little boy with a big imagination who grew up to become one of the world�fs best loved storytellers.

Brown draws on Garcia Marquez's memoir, Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf, 2003), to describe for children the magical elements that shaped the writer�fs early life. We learn about the hundred-year-old parrot; about Lorenzo the Magnificent, who seemed, to Gabito, able to foretell the future; about the ghost who shared his large family's small house; and about Gabito's beloved grandfather, Nicolas, who had a giant dictionary filled with many words.

Raul Colon's vibrant and richly textured oil pastel illustrations are the perfect complement to Brown's prose and the world we have all imagined in Garcia Marquez's writing. We see Garcia Marquez's hometown of Aracataca, Colombia come to life in the deep greens and reds, lush blues, and glowing orange-yellows that one imagines in his stories. Colon also takes the opportunity to illustrate some of the characters and scenes made famous in Garcia Marquez's books: workers at a banana plantation, a man with enormous wings falling from the sky, the most beautiful woman in the world (with colorfully striped hair), and a shipwrecked sailor.

The book closes with a one-page biography touching on the major events of Garcia Marquez's life opposite a portrait of the man floating out of the Colombian mountains, where he spent his magical early life and which have themselves become engraved on the imaginations of millions of readers all over the world.

My Name is Gabito not only introduces children to the gifted writer as a young boy, it also introduces them to the literary genre he is credited with inventing, magical realism. "When Gabito grew up," Brown writes, "he wrote the most exciting stories in the world. His stories were magical and amazing, but just as real as you or me." Put simply, it is Garcia Marquez's talent for seeing the world as it is and simultaneously as a magical, surprising place that gives his work such broad appeal. This Pura Belpre Honor Book captures that idea in a way that will resonate with young children.

Abigail Sawyer
July 2008