The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

I have the feeling I am easily impressed by illustration in picture books, probably because I can’t draw a triangle, but this book has magnificent tones and colors, and dimensional shapes that make me keep feeling the page for texture. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is an autobiographical narrative about the Malawian childhood of William Kamkwamba, now an engineering student at Dartmouth and TED speaker.

Pre-readers will like the story of a boy determined to generate electricity from the scarcity of materials available to him. Early readers will enjoy practicing the occasional Chichewan word, especially misala (crazy). The book is enlightening without being preachy: Malawi is an underdeveloped country and young readers may be surprised that it is a major accomplishment for William to generate enough power from a windmill for a single lightbulb.

Kamkwamba wrote The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind with Bryan Mealer.  Elizabeth Zunon is responsible for the illustrations that continue to entrance me—I hate to gush, but there it is. Zunon notes that she used oil paint and cut paper. The book is 32 pages long, and published by Dial.

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