Dazzlin’ Dolly: The Songwriting, Hit-Singing, Guitar-Picking Dolly Parton

Free verse peppered with Southern dialect and colloquialisms reads like a ballad of Dolly Parton’s perseverance on her rise to stardom in this spirited picture book biography. As a child in a “newspaper-pasted-over-drafty-walls poor” family, Dolly Parton makes music with a homemade guitar and tin can microphone, but when her uncle books her on a live radio show, “big-dreamin’ Dolly/ FROZE—/ barely able to breathe.” Never one to back down, Dolly stands up to the “stage-fright bully” and fights for her dream of being a Nashville star. Slade’s alliterative, rhythmic lines dynamically resonate with the book’s subject. Focusing on Dolly, portrayed throughout wearing pops of red, Fotheringham’s digitally rendered artwork leaves backgrounds sketchy and muted for contrast, an apt visual metaphor for the biography’s “dazzlin’ ” subject. Back matter includes “More About Dolly.” Ages 7–10. (Sept.)