…Cecilia Ruiz captures the particular tenderness of grandmothers in…her first book written expressly for young children. Ruiz's The Book of Memory Gaps (2015) and The Book of Extraordinary Deaths (2018) are dazzlingly Goreyesque in their cataloging of suggestive memory disorders and evocative deaths from the seventh century B.C. to the present. A Gift From Abuela, with its block-printed illustrations in muted colors, is more modest in its storytelling and heartwarming in its message, though Ruiz still manages to capture complex social realities (the economic crisis in Mexico in the early 1990s, the alienation of older adults).
The New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Anastas
05/28/2018
The story traces how time shifts family situations, and—a point not commonly taken up in picture books—the way people’s economic circumstances can change in ways they can’t plan for or control. But Ruiz’s most important message is that love survives no matter what.
08/01/2018
2018-06-19
