Posted on by TracyC

Maria’s Comet

Maria’s Comet by Deborah Hopkinson, illustrated by Deborah Lanino, 1999.

This picture book is a fictional story about a real person, Maria Mitchell. (She pronounced her first name “ma-RYE-ah”, not “ma-REE-ah”.) Maria Mitchell was born into a Quaker family on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts in 1818, and she became the first female astronomer in the United States. She is known for discovering a comet only viewable through a telescope in 1847, and she also became the first astronomy professor at Vassar College. She is the namesake of the Maria Mitchell Association, a science center on Nantucket. She was also an abolitionist, although this topic is not touched on in the book. Maria’s father taught her about astronomy when she was young and encouraged her interests and career at a time when not many women were encouraged to pursue careers or higher education.

Maria’s papa is an astronomer. At night, he goes up on the roof their house to use his telescope, and he explains how the telescope works, gathering and focusing light to make distant objects look larger and closer than they would with just a person’s eyes. He especially likes to look for comets. In their time, they’re not entirely sure what comets are made of, and that’s part of what makes studying them interesting. Maria imagines what it would be like to travel across the sky with a comet, encountering the different planets.

Most of Maria’s life centers around their house and family in Nantucket. There are nine children in the family, so Maria helps with chores and tells her siblings bedtime stories. Sometimes, she and her brother Andrew go into the attic and use an old atlas to pretend that they’re explorers. When they read books, Maria likes books about astronomers, but Andrew likes books about sailors. He wants to be a sailor himself.

When Andrew gets older, he runs away from his family to go to sea on a whaling boat. The entire family is sad that he is gone, and Maria soothes her siblings by telling them stories about all of the amazing places their brother will go. That night, after supper, Maria asks her father if she can come with him to look through his telescope or “sweep the sky” as she thinks of it. For a moment, Maria thinks they will say no, but they agree. Maria wants to be an explorer of the sky, like her brother wanted to explore the seas.

Maria’s father points out Polaris, the North Star, to Maria and says that sailors use it to navigate. Maria wonders if Andrew might be looking at the same star right now. Then, she sees a comet streak across the sky.

There’s an Author’s Note in the back of the book that explains about the real life of Maria Mitchell. It has some comments about what people of her time knew and didn’t now about the planets. When she was young, people only knew about seven planets in the solar system. Neptune was discovered during her lifetime (although not by her), and Pluto wasn’t discovered until 1930, after she had died. There is also a section about the astronomy terms used in the story and famous astronomers.

My Reaction

I enjoy books about historical people, although the author admits in the Author’s Note that this particular story about Maria Mitchell is fiction. I have mixed feelings about that. I don’t like to fictionalize real people, and I’m not entirely sure whether there’s any truth to the story about Maria’s relationship with her brother and how she felt when he left to become a sailor. On the other hand, I did appreciate how the book showed Maria becoming interested in astronomy by watching her father and joining him in his studies of the sky, which is apparently true. Overall, I did enjoy the story.

The pictures in the book are wonderful. They capture the coziness of an old-fashioned 19th-century home and also the wonderment of looking to the skies and imagining exploring the big, wide world and the stars beyond it.

Posted on by TracyC

Five Secrets in a Box

Five Secrets in a Box by Catherine Brighton, 1987.

This story is about Virginia Galilei (1600-1634), the eldest child of Galileo Galilei, and her perception of his work and equipment as a young child. The book has sections of historical information about Galileo and Virginia in the front and the back inside cover, although the story itself is just about Virginia exploring Galileo’s study.

Virginia, as a young child, knows that her father stays up late at night, studying the night sky, while she is asleep. During the day, she must be quiet to let him sleep. She is not really supposed to touch his scientific instruments, but she can’t resist the temptation to take a look. In her father’s study, she finds a box with five mysterious objects in it, and she investigates what they do.

One of them is a lens that makes small things look bigger. Another is a lens that makes things that are far away look closer. There is another lens that makes everything look blue and another that makes everything look red. Then, there is also a plain, white feather.

Virginia wonders what the purpose of the feather is, and she asks her father about it. He tells her that it is important to his work.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

According to the historical information provided, little Virginia’s mother left Galileo and married someone else while Virginia was still young. Virginia remained living with Galileo and was close to her father. When she was 12 years old, her father sent her to a convent, which was a fairly common way for upper-class girls at that time to get an education. However, Galileo probably intended for his daughters to join the Church as nuns rather than marrying when their education was complete. The book doesn’t explain this, but Virginia and her younger brother and sister were born out of wedlock. Because they were illegitimate (born outside of a legally-recognized marriage – the word “illegitimate” literally refers to someone born outside of the law and legal standing with implications about both the legal status of their parents’ union and the child’s possible future inheritance, depending on the laws of that particular society), their social status was compromised from birth. Galileo believed that it would be difficult for his daughters to find husbands, so joining a convent and becoming nuns would provide the girls with stable lives and careers as well as an education, which is what both of them did. Virginia remained at the convent as a nun, taking the name of Sister Maria Celeste, and unfortunately, died relatively young at the age of 34. The book doesn’t say why, but it was because she contracted dysentery, which is caused by consuming tainted water or food.

The story itself doesn’t really explain the purpose of the five special objects that Virginia examines in her father’s study. Some of them are obvious because readers will recognize what they are and the way they work. The purpose of the feather is left a little mysterious at the end, but readers get the full explanation by reading the section of historical information. Galileo was studying gravity, and apparently, he dropped objects off of the leading tower of Pisa to study how long it took them to fall. A feather will take longer to reach the ground than a stone, but that’s because of air resistance. One of Galileo’s premises was that, if there were no air to produce that air resistance, the stone and the feather would fall at the same rate of time due to gravity. I think I would have preferred to have Galileo explain some of this to his daughter when she asks him about the feather, but the story ends kind of abruptly at that point, with Virginia just playing with the feather. I felt like the ending isn’t exactly an ending without that explanation.

The pictures are the main reason why I really liked this book. They are colorful and realistic, and I thought they did a great job of showing the scientific instruments of the past. I also liked some of the little details of the house included in the backgrounds of the pictures. There is a crucifix hanging on the wall behind the telescope in Galileo’s study because this is a religious household, even though some of Galileo’s assertions about the way the world works clashed with Church teachings and got him placed under house arrest. (The book says that he was “sent to prison”, but he was actually placed under house arrest rather than being sent to a prison because he was elderly and in bad health by that point in his life.)

The book doesn’t go into detail about Galileo’s arrest because that happened later in his life, but he was basically considered a heretic for his belief in Copernicus‘s theory that the sun is the center of the solar system instead of the Earth. That sounds like a rather petty charge, and you might wonder why it matters or what different it could make to religion. It wasn’t a new idea because others had reached that conclusion long before him. Copernicus was never arrested for his ideas, partly because he didn’t live very long after he published them, but his book was placed on the restricted list by the Inquisition.

The reason why the relative positions of the sun and the Earth mattered depend on whether particular Biblical passages are meant to be interpreted literally or figuratively. Under a strict literal interpretation, which was the interpretation approved by the Church at that time, the conclusion was that the Earth was the center of the solar system, so saying otherwise would be to go against the Bible and Church teaching, making it a heresy. It wasn’t so much that the relative positions of the sun and the Earth were that important by themselves so much as the act of apparently contradicting the Bible. The Renaissance era was also the era of the Reformation, where Protestants were breaking away from the Catholic Church, partly because of the questions of literal interpretation of the Bible and Church doctrine. The Catholic Church’s response to that during this period was to become more strict in enforcing moral and doctrinal standards in the Counter-Reformation, so anything that seemed to challenge these aspects of the faith was taken far more seriously during this period. This stance would shift again later in history.

The background and aftermath to this story is far more complex than the story itself, although I think part of the charm of the story is it’s simplicity. This is one particular day and a small incident, seen through the eyes of a child, even though adult readers know that there are bigger events surrounding it.

Posted on by TracyC

Anno’s Journey

Anno’s Journey by Mitsumasa Anno, 1977.

This picture book is unusual because there are no words in it at all until the very end. It’s all pictures, except for the part that explains the inspiration for the story. The author/illustrator, Mitsumasa Anno, depicts himself as a traveler, traveling through the countryside and towns of Europe. The “story” is the story of his journey, but it’s all in the pictures.

In the first pages of the book, we see Anno arriving by rowboat and either buying or renting a horse. The following pages are a little like the Where’s Waldo/Wally books, showing Anno’s travels. Anno appears somewhere on every page, riding his horse, but readers have to look for him. There are also other things to look for, but readers don’t get that explanation until the very end.

The scenes start out in the countryside, and as Anno goes through towns and cities, they can be very busy, with many people and lots of things happening. Toward the end of the book, Anno goes through the countryside again, and it ends with him riding off toward the horizon.

Along the way, there are interesting, detailed scenes that show various aspects of countryside and town life. There are people working in farm fields, people packing up to move house, some men carving tombstones for a churchyard, some children playing and running a race near their school, and a busy market square.

There are also special occasions and very busy scenes, from a wedding in front of a town church to a circus scene and a parade through a city. Aside from the main event in each scene, there are also other things happening in the background, from people working to repair a roof to a prisoner escaping from a castle. Through it all, Anno is always somewhere in the scene, riding the horse.

There is hidden depth to the pictures. There is a section at the back which explains the story behind the book. The author and illustrator, Mitsumasa Anno, is from Japan, but he has always been fascinated by European culture, art, and architecture. Twice, during the 1960s and 1970s, he visited Europe, taking in the sights and producing his own art. This book is based on his travels, and the pictures incorporate the types of towns, fields, and churches he saw. However, they also include many hidden details, including details from famous paintings, characters from books and folktales (and also Sesame Street), and the stories of some of the characters in this book, carried across multiple pages, for readers to notice.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive, along with a couple of other books by the same author, in a similar format, Anno’s Italy and Anno’s Britain.

My Reaction

I enjoy books with detailed pictures, especially ones that contain details for readers to notice, like a game. I didn’t see many of the details that are hidden in plain sight until after I read the explanation of what to look for, but there is quite a lot to see in this book. It’s the kind of book that you can look at many times and notice something new every time! Although this is considered a children’s picture book, I think that there are many things that adults might see in it that would go over the heads of children. Children wouldn’t be likely to get all of the art references, for example. It’s a book that can appeal to a variety of people of different ages!

Posted on by TracyC

Moonflute

Moonflute by Audrey Wood, illustrated by Don Wood, 1980, 1986.

One night, a little girl named Firen can’t sleep. It’s a hot summer night, the moon is full, and Firen feels like the moon has taken away her sleep, so she must go out into the night and look for it.

Outside, Firen raises up her hands to the moon and asks for her sleep back. The magical moon sends her a moonbeam, and when Firen touches it, she realizes that it’s solid. It’s actually a flute. When Firen plays the flute, it makes magical music that doesn’t sound like any normal flute, and it brings all sorts of wonderful smells of things that Firen loves. As she continues to play, she feels light and tingly, and she realizes that she is rising into the air!

Firen flies over the countryside, looking for her sleep. As she journeys through the night, she sees various animals and wonders if they have her sleep. She sees cats in a patch of catnip, whales playing in the ocean, and bats and monkeys in a jungle.

When Firen sees a couple of monkeys soothing a baby monkey to sleep, she thinks about her own parents and uses the flute to return home. Is the moonflute helping her find her sleep at home with her parents, or has she actually been asleep all the time?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

This book follows the “It was all a dream” theme, where the main character experiences something fantastic, but they were dreaming all the time. While Firen was wondering where her sleep was, she apparently fell asleep. It isn’t definite that’s what happened, but it’s implied when her parents go to her room, and she’s in bed, without the flute. If readers would like to think of it differently, that Firen really did have her flying adventures, it’s possible to read it that way, too.

The pictures really make this book! The illustrations are oil paintings, and they are beautiful and ethereal. Firen witnesses some stunning scenes, like whales leaping in the ocean, with everything bathed in glowing moonlight.

I was intrigued by the name “Firen” because I don’t think I’ve heard it before, and I like unusual names. I couldn’t find much information about the name online, so it seems like it isn’t very common. I thought at first that it might be a modern, invented name, although one name site says that it has Arabic origins.

Posted on by TracyC

The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum

The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum by Kate Bernheimer, pictures by Nicoletta Ceccoli, 2008.

In this story, there is a little girl who lives in a castle in a museum, inside a big, glass globe.

Children love to come to the museum and look at her in her castle. The girl also likes it when the children come to see her.

Although the girl in the castle has other creatures to play with and things she likes to do, like making music, she sometimes gets lonely when the museum closes, and all the children go home.

When the girl in the castle dreams, she dreams of the children who come to visit her at the museum, imagining their journeys to come see her.

When the children are visiting or when she’s dreaming about them, the girl isn’t lonely, but when she wakes up from a dream and there aren’t any children, she gets lonely again.

However, the girl gets an idea. If you, the reader, want to be her friend, you can give her your picture. When she looks at your picture, she won’t be lonely anymore!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

I love the surreal, fantasy pictures in this book! We don’t know exactly what the girl is or why this tiny girl lives in a miniature castle in a museum. The book says that people claim “she’s lived there forever.” She is alive and has feelings, but she seems to be surrounded by fantasy creatures as companions in her castle rather than other people. She doesn’t seem to have parents or family. My theory is that she is a magical, living toy because the museum seems to be filled with other toys, the fantasy creatures in her castle seem to be toys with little wind-up keys in their backs, and the castle itself incorporates little toys and odd-and-ends, like buttons and marbles. However, the girl’s backstory is left up to the imagination of the readers.

This book breaks the fourth wall of the book, with the girl inviting readers to put their own pictures into the book and saying that the girl can see them through the book when they read it. Readers looking at the book keep the tiny girl company when she doesn’t have visitors to her museum. It’s not the first book that I’ve seen that uses the concept of readers keeping a book character company through their books. There is a book from the 1930s called The Tale of Corally Crothers, where a lonely girl with no brothers and sisters goes in search of a friend and finds you, the reader. (I haven’t found a copy of it myself, but you can see some pictures of this book on this site.) Books that involve the reader and invite the reader into their world are charming, and I found the fantasy elements of this particular book delightful!

Posted on by TracyC

Raggedy Ann’s Tea Party Book

Raggedy Ann’s Tea Party Book by Elizabeth Silbaugh, illustrated by Laura Francesca Filippucci, 1999.

This book is a children’s guide to planning a tea party with Raggedy Ann. As in the original books, Raggedy Ann is a doll who lives with a girl named Marcella, and she likes to have tea parties with Marcella’s other dolls and stuffed animals.

The book explains how to plan and prepare for a tea party, from figuring out how many guests there will be and making sure there are enough seats for everyone to choosing a menu and games to play. There are tips for making party invitations and a section of recipes in the back of the book.

The food ideas aren’t too complicated. The book recommends keeping preparations simple because a party is about having fun. Setting the table is an activity by itself. Raggedy Ann gets her guests to help her, and they put on music while they do it. They want to make the table setting pretty, and they make sure that everyone knows each other and is included in the conversation. Tea parties are a time to practice good manners and make sure everyone is enjoying the party. At the end of the party, guests can also help clean up while they play music.

For games to play, they recommend the classic game of Telephone, Fiddly Diddly (a guessing game), and Memory Tray, where guests look at a tray of objects for a limited amount of time and then try to remember everything they’ve seen.

The recipes included in the book are:

  • Easy Chocolate Cakes
  • Creamy Pink and White Icing
  • Tiny Sandwiches – They suggest a variety of possible fillings, including tuna, ham, tomato, hard-boiled egg, cucumbers, cheese, fruit, or jam.
  • Raggedy Ann’s Candy-Heart Cookies – These are heart-shaped cutout cookies because Raggedy Ann has a candy heart.
  • Uncle Clem’s Super-Simple Scotch Shortbread
  • Marcella’s Lemonade

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). There is another book by the same author called Raggedy Ann’s Birthday Party Book, about planning a birthday party.

My Reaction

I found it charming and nostalgic, and I loved the colorful pictures! I didn’t read this book as a child, but it is the kind of book I would have liked. The party-planning tips are useful, taking child readers step-by-step through planning the party, inviting the guests, and preparing food and entertainment. I liked the advice to keep things simple, so even the host/hostess can enjoy the party instead of getting stressed over complicating preparations. The recipes in the book fit the tea party theme, and they are simple enough for children to make or at least help in their preparation without being overly simplistic.

Posted on by TracyC

Mrs. Gigglebelly is Coming for Tea

Mrs. Gigglebelly is Coming for Tea by Donna Guthrie, illustrated by Katy Keck Arnsteen, 1990.

Elizabeth Ann tells her mother that Mrs. Gigglebelly is coming for tea today, but her mother says that she’s in the middle of her spring cleaning and doesn’t have time to prepare for Mrs. Gigglebelly today. In fact, she suggests that Mrs. Gigglebelly might be busy today, but Elizabeth Ann says that Mrs. Gigglebelly always has time for tea with her.

Since her mother is busy with chores and can’t prepare tea or a cake for Mrs. Gigglebelly, Elizabeth Ann fixes some lemonade and crackers with grape jelly for their “tea.” While Elizabeth Ann waits in the garden for Mrs. Gigglebelly, her mother dashes about, doing her chores.

At first, it seems like Mrs. Gigglebelly isn’t going to come, but she eventually arrives because she always has time for Elizabeth Ann … so does her mother.

My Reaction

This is a cute story about a mother who makes time for her child, even when she’s busy. “Mrs. Gigglebelly” seems to be a game of pretend the mother and daughter play together when they have their tea parties. On this particular day, the mother is very busy, but she still throws together a costume for their game. The book doesn’t say that “Mrs. Gigglebelly” is Elizabeth Ann’s mother, but it’s implied in the story, and in the last picture, readers can see pieces of “Mrs. Gigglebelly’s” improvised costume around the room.

I thought it was sweet that the mother in the story took time for a little fun and silliness and a special moment with her daughter, even though she had work to do. Some mothers might just lecture their child about how they’re busy and the child just has to accept that, but this mother understands that her attention is important to her child. Sometimes, it’s the little moments that mean a lot, even if it’s just pausing to share a snack. She does make her daughter wait because there are things she has to do, but the wait is worth it because the mother follows through and makes the effort to make time for her daughter.

Elizabeth Ann also doesn’t nag her mother about hurrying up or try to convince her mother to drop everything she’s doing and play with her instead of doing her cleaning. Instead, she waits patiently, confident that her mother will have time for her eventually because her mother has already established that her daughter is a priority and that she will make time for her. It looks like this mother-daughter pair understands each other well and that they have a good relationship with each other, and I like that.

Posted on by TracyC

Whose Garden Is It?

Whose Garden Is It? by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Jane Dyer, 2001.

This is a cute picture book, told in rhyme, about who is the real owner of a garden.

One day, Mrs. McGee goes for a walk and passes a beautiful garden. She wonders aloud whose garden it is. Of course, the owner of the garden, who is tending the plants speaks up, but he’s not the only one.

A small rabbit also tells Mrs. McGee that the garden belongs to him because he’s lived there his whole life, and he eats the vegetables. Then, a woodchuck says that’s nothing because he eats everything that grows in the garden. A bird chimes in, saying he eats the worms from the garden. Then, a worm says that worms are there to make the soil in the garden better, so he’s the real owner of the garden.

Various other creatures, big and small speak up, each of them pointing out that they live in the garden, what they’ve done for the garden, and what the garden has done for them. The bees and butterflies pollinate the flowers.

But what about the plants in the garden? They have a strong argument that they are what makes the garden a garden. Then again, the soil is where the plants grow, and the plants need the sun and rain to grow. Also, all plants grow from seeds, so the garden exists for the seeds that will be the future plants.

It seems that the answer to Mrs. McGee’s question isn’t as easy as she might have thought.

My Reaction

This is a charming story about how various plants, animals, creatures, and forces of nature are interconnected. The book doesn’t use the word “ecosystem“, but that’s the concept being described here. The garden’s ownership and the reason for its existence is much more than the gardener who owns the land and planted and tended the garden; it’s everything that’s growing in it, everything that contributes to its growth, and everything that depends on the garden. Without all of these creatures and natural forces put together, the garden wouldn’t be what it is.

The book doesn’t attempt to get scientific about the details of this garden ecosystem, and the animals wear clothes and talk, so the story isn’t meant to be entirely realistic. However, it is thought-provoking about how many different parts of nature affect each other. It could be a good book for introducing the topic to young children before teaching them about the science of ecosystems later. The rhyme scheme makes the story fun to read.

Posted on by TracyC

Isabel’s House of Butterflies

Isabel’s House of Butterflies by Tony Johnston, illustrated by Susan Guevara, 2003.

The story begins by explaining that the forests of Michoacan, Mexico are a sanctuary for monarch butterflies, but that sanctuary is in danger because of logging activities. The large-scale industry is a major threat, but sometimes poor people living in the area also chop down trees because they need to sell the wood. The author notes that there have been efforts to preserve these trees, but it’s difficult to enforce laws protecting them, and no one is sure what will happen to the monarch butterflies if the trees disappear.

Isabel is an eight-year-old girl living with her family on a small farm, and the tree outside their house attracts butterflies on their migration route. She calls it, “La casa de las mariposas,” which means “The House of Butterflies.” Her family is poor, but they can’t bring themselves to chop down their special butterfly tree, like other families in the area have done. They love it that the butterflies appear there every autumn, and they think it’s a beautiful miracle to see them return every year. Sometimes, tourists come to the area to see the butterflies, and that brings the family a little extra money.

However, one year, there is very little rain, and they have a very bad harvest. The family sells their pigs and continues on as best they can, but their money is running low. They don’t have many resources left for money, and Isabel’s father is reluctantly considering cutting down their butterfly tree. He doesn’t want to do it, but he doesn’t know what else to do.

Isabel is distressed at the loss of the tree and the butterflies, so she suggests another plan to her parents. She often helps her mother to make tortillas, so she tells her mother that maybe they can set up a stand selling tortillas to the tourists who come to see the butterflies. The family decides to give Isabel’s plan a try.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

The story ends on a somewhat hopeful note, but it bothered me a little because it’s not definite that Isabel’s plan is going to work. Isabel is hoping that they’ll be able to make enough money that they won’t need to cut down the tree, but we only see them getting set up, so we don’t know if they’re successful or not. I would have preferred to see them succeeding so we would know that things are going to get better, but the story just ends at that point, and it’s left up to the minds of the readers whether they were successful or not.

I think that hopeful but slightly worrying note at the end of the story is meant to reflect how people trying to preserve natural resources often feel – they have ideas and plans to help preserve natural areas and resources, but nobody knows for sure what will work or how well their plans will work. It’s realistic, if a little bit of a let-down. However, while nothing is guaranteed to be successful and life has its uncertainties, there is hope in the people who are willing to try different approaches to problems rather than simply giving up. The book does speak to the concerns that modern people, even children, have about the environment and the search for systems that work better than the ones that we already have.

The pictures in this book are soft, colorful, and lovely. Although the family is poor, they appreciate the small pleasures in their lives, like making the tortillas and the yearly appearance of the beautiful butterflies. I did also feel a little sorry for the butterflies the pigs ate, but the story doesn’t dwell on that part too much.

This book was published by Sierra Club Books for Children, and there is a small note with the publishing information about the origins of the Sierra Club, which is dedicated to protecting scenic and ecological resources.

Posted on by TracyC

Last Stop on Market Street

Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Pena, pictures by Christian Robinson, 2015.

After church, CJ and his grandmother have to wait for the bus while other people just get in their cars and leave. CJ is annoyed because it’s raining. He asks his Nana why they have to wait in the rain and why they don’t have a car. His Nana says that they don’t need a car because they have the bus.

The bus is interesting because many interesting people take the bus. The bus driver does little tricks, like pulling a coin from behind CJ’s ear, and there are interesting passengers, like the lady with a jar of butterflies and a man with a guitar.

While CJ’s friends, whose families have cars, go straight home after church, CJ and his Nana have somewhere else to go. CJ wishes that he could just go home, too, but Nana points out that the boys who just go straight home miss meeting so many interesting people. CJ does enjoy listening to the man with the guitar playing music on the bus.

CJ and his grandmother get off at the last stop on Market Street, which is in a bad neighborhood. CJ comments about how dirty it is, but his grandmother points out that people who surrounded by dirt know how to see what’s beautiful.

The reason why CJ and his grandmother are here is that they help out at a soup kitchen. CJ recognizes the faces of people he’s seen there before, and he realizes that he’s glad that he came.

This book is the winner of multiple awards. It’s a Newbery Medal winner, a Caldecott Honor book, and a Coretta Scott King Award honor book for its messages about appreciating and helping other people in a diverse community.

My Reaction

This is one of those picture books that I think can speak to adults as well as kids, maybe even more so because adults might understand some of the broader context of the story. CJ and his grandmother probably don’t have as much money as some of CJ’s friends and their families, which is why they don’t have a car. When CJ comments about why do they have to wait for the bus in the rain, his grandmother could have given him a straightforward answer about how they can’t afford a car, but that would have been depressing. Instead, she points out the positives of the bus and the people they meet. All through the book, she points out the positives about situations that both CJ and the readers can see are not entirely positive. It’s noticing these positives that help make the situation better.

CJ and his grandmother don’t have much money themselves, but Nana is teaching CJ how to help other people and build relationships with them. The people they meet are often poor people or people who are unfortunate in some way, but they still enjoy meeting these interesting people with colorful lives. There are times when CJ wishes that he could be somewhere else or doing something else, but yet, he also enjoys parts of where he is and realizes that what he’s doing is better than other things he could be doing. CJ and his grandmother experience the enrichment of life experiences and relationships with other people.