The Year We Learned to Fly (Picture Book)

 

Publication date: January 4, 2022

My Thoughts:

I woke up at 3:30 this morning to participate in the School Library Journal's Day of Dialog virtual event #SLJDOD and was able to read this sampler courtesy of Penguin Young Readers.

First, the text is by Jacqueline Woodson who is a beloved middle grades author whose prose is lyrical, her wordplay - hip hop. There is one phrase I love, love, love, extra love.

leaving all of our mad far behind us.

Second, the illustrations by Rafael López are bright and beautiful. His use of white space and juxtaposition and symbolism tell stories just as much as the text. 

Pre-order this book and then figure out how to use it. 

From the Publisher:

On a dreary, stuck-inside kind of day, a brother and sister heed their grandmother’s advice: “Use those beautiful and brilliant minds of yours. Lift your arms, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and believe in a thing. Somebody somewhere at some point was just as bored you are now.” And before they know it, their imaginations lift them up and out of their boredom. Then, on a day full of quarrels, it’s time for a trip outside their minds again, and they are able to leave their anger behind. This precious skill, their grandmother tells them, harkens back to the days long before they were born, when their ancestors showed the world the strength and resilience of their beautiful and brilliant minds. Jacqueline Woodson’s lyrical text and Rafael Lopez’s dazzling art celebrate the extraordinary ability to lift ourselves up and imagine a better world

 

Tween Tuesday: Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

Tween Tuesday is a meme hosted by Green Bean Teen Queen and it focuses on great books for tweens.  Please check her out for more reading ideas.

Title: Feathers

Author: Jacqueline Woodson

Publisher: Scholastic (January 8, 2009)

Paperback: 118 pages

Rating:  5 of 5 stars

Honors: Newberry Honor

From the back:

Frannie doesn't know what to make of the poem she's reading in school. She 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 althrough the new boy looks like a white kid, he says he's not white. Who is he?

 During a winter full of surprises, good and bad, Frannie starts seeing a lot of things in a new light--her brother Sean's deafness, her mother's fear, the class bully's anger, her best friend's faith and her own desire for "the thing with feathers."

My thoughts:
Frannie, the 6th grade narrator, is fascinated with Emily Dickinson's poetic lines, "Hope is the thing with feathers. . ." and struggles with making meaning of the poem in her own life. Woodson is an expert in the tween voice and her characters are keen observers as well as moral centers for her books. Although Frannie faces so much sadness, both in her life and those around her, she shows a great maturity and sensitivity. Woodson reminds us in her books that there is hope, and goodness and dignity.

This Newberry Honor book swept me away from page one with its sparse, poetic rhythms, strong imagery and vivid color.  Woodson writes:

The day before, Ms. Johnson had read us a poem about hope getting inside you and never stopping. I had written that part of the poem down--Hope is a thing with feathers-- because I had loved the sound of it. Loved the way the words seemed to float across my notebook.

The lives of Frannie, Jesus Boy, Sean (her deaf older brother), and Mama float across the pages of this book and "perch in my soul."

Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson

"There used to be four of us/Mama, Daddy, Lili and me. At night we went to sleep./In the morning we woke up and ate breakfast./That was four years ago."

11-year old Lonnie Collins Motion, Locomotion, suffers a traumatic life change when he's seven, and continues to be haunted by the events. But his 5th grade teacher, Ms. Marcus, shows him how to get his feelings down in poetry, and all the pain, like "little strings of smoke," finally have an outlet. 

This novel in verse, similar in form to Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, lets the reader into Lonnie's world and follows him through his pain and catharsis.

Ms. Woodson's rhythmical, spare prose style lends itself well to this book of poems.