Sorry, but for me in a given picture book, text and images do have to mesh and work well enough together (or at the very least, the combination of narrative and visuals needs to be and feel somewhat compatible and natural). And with this in mind, I really cannot give more than a one star rating to a picture book where the accompanying artwork has been such that the illustrations have actually aesthetically and visually very much creeped me out, a bit harsh as an assessment perhaps, but that is indeed the sad truth about how I personally felt when I was reading Isabel Sánchez Vegara's Frida Kahlo and viewing Gee Fan Eng's brightly colourful, expressive but to and for me also completely and utterly strange and yes visually quite horrible pictures. For especially and in particular the manner in which Eng tends to render her human figures, well, they appear as much too rigidly staring, with robot-like faces and unfathomable black holes as eyes. And thus, I personally and certainly do not and cannot consider how Frida Kahlo has been depicted in this book, in Frida Kahlo, as in any way either flattering or positive, for indeed with ALL of Gee Fan Eng's humans, they do seem to present themselves as completely lifeless, doll-like, and not even really all that human in fact, but more like rigidly stylised artificial beings that visually give me the shivers and in no way come even remotely close to celebrating and paying sufficient homage to Frida Kahlo as an artist and as a living and breathing person (as aside from them wearing different types of clothing, all of the illustrated humans in Frida Kohlo have basically been visually drawn and shown by Gee Fan Eng as appearing pretty much the same, with carbon copy facial features that totally seem more like what one would consider and expect in a collection of artificially created machines, with no personal expressions, no internal moods, nothing warm or imbued with actual feeling and passion ever in any manner managing to shine through and express itself).
Combined with the fact that even Isabel Sánchez Vegara's printed words, that the featured narrative of Frida Kahlo is majorly and a bit frustratingly simplistically bare bones, I have most definitely been more than a bit disappointed with and by this book. And while I guess that Frida Kahlo could perhaps somewhat work as a very basic and simple introduction to Frida Kahlo's life, the sad truth that NONE of Frida Kahlo's actual art has been reproduced (or is even in any way sufficiently hinted at with and by Gee Fan Eng in her accompanying illustrations, as even the few illustrations which do feature Frida Kahlo's artwork have the same strange facial expressions that so much bother me) this really does in my opinion not make Frida Kahlo a true introduction to the artist herself, to Frida Kahlo as a working and always striving artist (because to and for me, the majority of the book mostly just relates Frida Kahlo's struggles with her many illnesses, with her accident and while, yes, Frida Kahlo does feature the major tenets of her life, her legacy as an artist is in my opinion woefully under-represented and therefore indeed, the author's text, whilst engaging to a certain extent and interestingly, with empathy and sympathy penned contains not nearly enough about Frida Kahlo's work, is not sufficiently about her life as an artist and well, it also simply cannot erase and all that much mitigate the horrible manner in which Gee Fan Eng has shown and depicted her human figures, which at least to and for me, leave almost everything to be desired).