This Is My Eye: A New York Story

by Neela Vaswani, Neela Vaswani (Illustrator)

Overview

It’s not what you look at, it’s what you see! Take a journey through New York City as it might be seen by a child through a camera lens.

Shapes, colors, patterns, and people are everywhere, and things look different depending on how you look at them — and who is doing the looking. In this playful ode to photography and point of view, a poetic story posits how one young girl might capture moments of insight, community, and art in her beloved hometown, New York City. With the popularity of camera phones, photo-journaling, and photo-posting sites, this fictional exploration of photography as one young girl’s form of self-expression is guaranteed to appeal to budding photographers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780763676162
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	08/14/2018
Pages:	56
Product dimensions:	10.70(w) x 10.70(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Neela Vaswani is the co-author (with Silas House) of the middle-grade novel Same Sun Here and the author of You Have Given Me a Country and Where the Long Grass Bends. Her work has received an American Book Gold Award, an O. Henry Prize, and a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award. A teacher at Spalding University’s MFA in Writing program and founder of the Storylines Project with the New York Public Library, Neela Vaswani lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

The city's sweeping landscapes juxtaposed with its small, pulsating minutiae pick up an easy momentum as the poetic text moves rhythmically from page to page...Vaswani's debut picture book is an elegant and playful look at perspective, photography, and a familiar (to many) cityscape. A captivating journey.
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2018-05-14
A fictional exploration of how a young girl of color might move through and capture her world with a camera."My dad says it's not what you look at—it's what you see." So begins a young girl's documenting of her life and surroundings in New York City. The blurred lights and background when she spins, the mirrors in puddles, the stories on walls, the shapes and patterns of everything, the "little things that grow in little spaces," and even the smile of an upside-down selfie. The city's sweeping landscapes juxtaposed with its small, pulsating minutiae pick up an easy momentum as the poetic text moves rhythmically from page to page. The energy and pace of the city is channeled to the impact of each photograph as they are strung together by the observational text. An author's note clarifies that the photographs are Vaswani's (Same Sun Here, with Silas House, 2013, etc.) work, taken to mimic the perspective of a fictional 9-year-old girl. While readers may be prompted to wonder how a photo series taken by an actual child photographer might have differed, Vaswani's debut picture book is an elegant and playful look at perspective, photography, and a familiar (to many) cityscape.A captivating journey. (Picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Reviews