The shicketty-shakes and winketty-wonks amplify the fun of the language and make the book a joy to read aloud. Clarke’s exuberant poetic text combines simple sentences with evocative onomatopoeia. In an unnamed village on the edge of a “no-go desert,” a little girl with beautiful cornrows confides in readers about how she and her rowdy brothers spend their time sliding, jumping, and climbing under the “stretching-out sky.” But the best thing is their bike, a cobbled-together creation of found parts, like a dented car seat, tin-can handles, and a bark license plate that keeps falling off. Informative notes from both author and illustrator speak more to the story’s themes, and intentional connections the artist made between the African setting and characters and African Americans in the United States, including a “BLM” license plate.Kids make their own fun wherever they are, and Clarke’s The Patchwork Bike is an ode to this universal truth of childhood.
The same is true of the acrylic-on-recycled cardboard art, in which the use of shadow and light suggests the hot sun on every page. The fresh, playful use of language is perfectly suited to its theme. Set in a village on the African continent, “at the edge of the no-go desert,” under the “stretching-out sky,” the story featuring a Muslim family celebrates creativity, imagination, and universal joy in play. The bike is comprised of found objects: “handlebar branches that shicketty shake … tin can handles and wood-cut wheels…and a bell that used to be Mum’s milk pot.” That it is handmade out of economic necessity, sometimes requiring repairs relying on more ingenuity, is something that readers and listeners can infer, but it has no relation to the siblings’ pleasure and delight, which is absolute.
edition: Candlewick Press, 2018 The Patchwork Bike by Maxine Beneba ClarkeĪ girl enthusiastically describes her antics with her brothers, with riding the bike they built themselves her favorite of all they do.
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