I Am Made of Mountains

Praise

A tribute to Glacier Bay, Yellowstone, the Everglades, and other national parks.

Personifying her subject (“You may think you know me”), Hinrichs introduces, in rhyme, 16 parks, from Hawaii’s Haleakal­ā to Acadia in Maine, then goes on in a prose afterword to recap the genesis and growth of the National Park Service. In that long note, she describes how Native residents were driven from Yosemite (so named by White colonizers with an Ahwahneechee word that means “they are killers”) and how settlers of German, English, and Scottish descent were denigrated and then forcibly relocated from the land that became Shenandoah National Park. (The author also notes elsewhere that the latter was racially segregated until 1950.) Though her overall tone is celebratory, she closes by reassuring readers that mixed feelings are natural and leadingly asks them to think of ways to “connect with each other to share and honor our differences.” Mineker depicts a range of grand landscapes and natural wonders in her digital illustrations; she puts a cast of human figures—diverse in terms of race and ability—prominently in the foregrounds to underscore the point that national parks exist to be experienced as well as preserved. A page of thoughtful comments from actual young park visitors at the end reinforces the theme.

An enticing look at our national parks—rhapsodic but with attention to their checkered history. 

—Kirkus Reviews