Once in a while I’ll be impressed by a book for kids, pick it up to review it, and in the course of writing the review become more and more impressed as I return to the book for double, triple, quadruple looks. It hasn’t happened all that much lately. Usually it requires a special kind of title. So when I saw Jimmy the Greatest! a month or so ago I thought it might make for a good review thanks to its subject matter. It’s not like fun stories set in poor Latin America villages appear on my desk every day. I read it and enjoyed it but it wasn’t until I reread it, and reread it, and reread it, and reread it some more that the sheer brilliance of this little number got to me. With a careful hand author/illustrator pair Jairo Buitrago and Rafael Yockteng have created a book that is an ode to the people who stay in small communities, helping and improving the daily lives of their friends and neighbors. This is a story that folks can relate to, no matter where they live. It’s a paean to the heroes of small town life. Unsung heroes, I have located your book.
Jimmy’s fishing village is not particularly big or impressive since “there is usually only one small church and, if you’re lucky, a little gym where you can hit a punching bag, skip rope or box.” Boxing is precisely what Jimmy and all the other kids in the village spend a lot of their time doing, until one day Don Apolinar (who runs the gym) gives Jimmy a box containing books, magazines, and information about a guy named Muhammad Ali. Suddenly Jimmy starts using those glasses he never paid much attention to before and he’s reading everything he can get his hands on. In time, Don Apolinar leaves the village for the big city, but that’s okay. Jimmy stays behind, opening a little library and improving the boxing ring, and making the village a better place.
I was discussing this book with a friend the other day and asked her, “Can you think of any other picture book where a character from a small town stays in that town to improve the lives of others?” She pointed out to me that while that may not happen in a lot of fictional picture books, it happens all the time in nonfiction ones. Of course usually in books like Planting the Trees of Kenya by Claire A. Nivola or She Sang Promise by Jan Godown Annino the hero goes away, gets some kind of training, then comes back to their village or tribe to improve life for others. The interesting thing about Jimmy the Greatest! is that our hero stays to make things better without ever having left himself. Yet what I liked about this was that the book doesn’t box Jimmy in. When he&rsq