This book does a great job at touching on important subjects such as social class and economic status. Maya is made fun of because of the second hand clothes she wears. It is very important for young readers to be aware that not all children are financially well off, and it is not appropriate to ...
Lonnie (Locamotion) and his little sister Lili get separated living in different foster homes after their parents die in a fire. Lonnie decides to write letters to Lili so she won’t forget him while they are living apart. Lonnie lives with Miss Edna, who he loves and her two sons who are in Iraq....
Date: November 24th, 2014Author: Jacqueline Woodson; Illustrated by James RansomeTitle: This Is The RopePlot: Jacqueline Woodson's picture-book features the life of Beatrice, a young African-American Brooklyn-raised girl, her mother and grandmother who left the South, along with 6 million other A...
About a little girl who doesn't want her mom to have another baby. This book is a great book for introducing alternative families because in the book there is no father. Gia and her mother live alone together. Also when her aunts and uncles come over, not all of them are the same race. These dif...
POETRY AND JACQUELINE WOODSONI never thought that I would have liked a book of poetry; but, I loved this book. Like, LOVED it. It was a quick read and it was written from the perspective of an African-American, 11-year-old boy, Lonnie Collins Motion (Lo-co-motion). At seven-years-old, his parents...
"I feel so stretched out. Like I'm broken in a million pieces or something." —Margaret, "Last Summer With Maizon", P. 32 "But I knew she had grown into someone I wasn't. I still love her for who she was, not for who she became." —Grandma, "Last Summer With Maizon", P. 53 "You're my best frien...
A quiet, beautifully etched portrait of a first love that is shattered by the racism, If You Come Softly traces the relationship of two teens whose lives intertwine for a short but life-changing time. Ellie is Jewish and white. Jeremiah is black. Both are from well-to-do families where it's somet...
Jacqueline Woodson's remarkable, award-winning story of a boy coming to grips a sudden change in his family.Melanin Sun's mother has some big news: she's in love with a woman. Now he has many decisions to make: Should he stand by his mother even though it could mean losing his friends? Should he ...
At the end of I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, Marie's friend Lena and her little sister Dion ran away to escape their abusive father. Now, disguised as boys, Lena and Dion search for their mother's relatives, unable to afford to make even one mistake.
(NOTE: This review is an excerpt from a graduate level research paper. The rating (stars) and the critical review are mutually exclusive; the former simply pertains to my subjective partiality to the story)Jacuqeline Woodson’s Miracles’s Boys serves as a prime example of a narrative that incorpor...
Staggerlee is used to being alone. As the granddaughter of celebrities and the daughter of an interracial couple in an all-black town, she has become adept at isolating herself from curious neighbors. But then her cousin, Trout, comes to visit. Trout is exactly like Staggerlee wishes she could be...
"Hope is the thing with feathers," starts the poem Frannie is reading in school. Frannie hasn't thought much about hope. There are so many other things to think about. Each day, her friend Samantha seems a bit more holy.There is a new boy in class everyone is calling the Jesus Boy. And although ...
This excellent YA novel concerns Afeni, who is twelve years old and lives with her mother. Her parents are divorced, and her mother is a recovering alcoholic, but things have been stable for Afeni and she and her mother certainly don't lack for anything -- her mom is also a bit of a workaholic. A...
Margaret and Maizon are back together on Madison Street, but their friendship is different now. Margaret needs more time alone, and it's not just the two of them any more-their new neighbor and classmate, Caroline, has become part of their lives. But that seems minor next to what is about to happ...
Maizon takes the biggest step in her life when she accepts a scholarship to boarding school and says good-bye to her grandmother and her best friend, Margaret. Blue Hill is beautiful, and challenging-but there are only five black students, and the other four are from wealthy families. Does Maizon...
This beautiful sequel to If You Come Softly explores the experiences of those left behind after tragedy. It is a novel in which through hope, understanding and love, healing begins.
And then it’s science. He wants to know everything about rockets and medicine and the galaxy. He wants to know where the sky ends and how, what does it feel like when gravity’s gone and what is the food men eat on the moon. His questions come so fast and so often that we f...
There was a Tupac song playing and me and Neeka stopped dead in our tracks when the announcer came on and said the name of the song and told us Tupac had been shot five times the night before. “They shot him?” Neeka whispered. “News is saying somebody robbed him at some recording studio. Took for...
He touched one to his tongue, then dipped it into the bag and held it up for me. Seems slow motion, remembering now the way I moved my head down so that my nostril was right over that little bit of moon. The way T-Boom whispered sniff hard, and so I did, feeling something bitter drip down the bac...
Maybe he looked at us in that moment and saw two daughters—his copper pennies—safe, but not safe. Girls. But black girls. And me, tall and skinny and always running and climbing trees and, even at thirteen, still coming home with skinned knees and jammed fingers. Me, who was always begging to hav...
There were sloe-eyes and licked lips wherever our new breasts and lengthening thighs moved. Angela and Gigi and I showed up at Sylvia’s house one Saturday morning when the family was gone. Sylvia, able to sneak us inside, stood ironing her Catholic school uniform as we talked. It happened, Angela...