Genre
This book is in the historical nonfiction genre.
Targeted Age Group
The targeted age group for this book is ages 6-9.
Summary
This book is based on an African American spiritual, with African American history written into the lyrics as the text of the book. It covers the span of Black history in America, from enslavement to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Justification
I chose this book as a Coretta Scott King award book, which specifically was awarded for its illustrations by Frank Morrison. I chose it for these illustrations, as well as to learn more about the African American spiritual that inspired this book and served to frame the African American history presented within.
Evaluation
For my review of this book, I will discuss the illustrations, style and language, and characters.
The illustrations in this book, as mentioned above, are what won the Coretta Scott King award for this book. Each page is dynamic, capturing elements of violence, resistance, stillness, and joy. The dynamic artwork enhances the historical reality of the people portrayed: they are alive in the artwork just as they were alive in their own times. The artwork itself is stunning. Morrison’s (2022) soft brush strokes beautifully texturize each scene, and make the movement in these paintings feel fluid and believable. The composition on each page is as dynamic as the people: one painting symbolically renders a moment of prayer after the Emancipation Proclamation, with the proclamation itself in the background. A painting of Ruby Bridges captures her dodging across both pages while a rock flies past, angry protestors in the background with racist signs blotted out, and a disparaging paper picturing Martin Luther King Jr. floats down in the foreground. The composition of this latter piece—its diagonal lines, and chaos in both foreground and background—depict what must have been the chaos of that day. Each painting in this book receives the same care in using angles, perspectives, symbolism, and more to represent the history they portray.
The language in this book is dual: it is framed around the lyrics of the African American spiritual “Standing in the Need of Prayer,” and tells about historical people and events across African American history. The added text is built in place of the line “It’s me, it’s me, O Lord,” replacing it with the historical subjects featured throughout the book. Weatherford (2022) masterfully rhymes the added text, thus maintaining the musicality of the poem. The text on the first and last pages is mirrored and returns to the lyrics of the spiritual (the only difference is father/mother versus preacher/teacher), which serves both to close the circle of the text, and to compare early and modern African American history. On the first pages of this book, African Americans both old and young stand enslaved and dehumanized in chains. On the last page (before the author’s references) two young Black Americans, softly smiling, stand at a protest surrounded by phrases such as “say her name,” “BLM,” “my life still matters,” and “justice” (Morrison, 2022). The mirrored text connects generations of Black Americans and echoes that across time and across fights for justice, each individual “stand[s] in the need of prayer” (Weatherford, 2022).
For the sake of using the literary term, I also want to discuss the ‘characters’ in this book, but there is nothing fictional about these people: their lives and stories are real and impactful. As Young et. al. (2020) writes, “People who live between the covers of a book must be as real as people who live across the street” (p. 19). Both Weatherford (2022) and Morrison (2022) ensure that the reality of these historical people is felt not only through the illustrations and poetry, but include a reference page in the back of the book that goes into greater detail on the people and events portrayed throughout the text. For its young audience, the material included is a brief and easy introduction to the history portrayed in the book. It ensures that these people are represented and remembered both visually and textually: able to be identified by their names and written histories.
Happy reading!
References
Weatherford, C. B. (2022). Standing in the need of prayer: A modern retelling of the classic spiritual (F. Morrison, Illus.). Crown Books for Young Readers.
Young, T. A., Bryan, G., Jacobs, J. S., Tunnel, M. O. (2020). Children’s literature, briefly. Pearson Education, Inc.
No comments:
Post a Comment