Tuesday Storytime: Black History Month: Families

One day off, but I'm squeezing it in there anyway, because I had good beautiful books to showcase.

My Family Plays Music
Judy Cox, illustrated by Elbrite Brown
ISBN: 0823415910
A lovely variety of brown and black faces and bodies playing beautiful music in varied venues.

The ONLY downside to this book is that there are a LOT of family members to get through.  The music styles and venues and instruments are interesting and varied, from great-grandmother on the church pipe organ to niece Sadie playing the pots and pans in the kitchen, and our narrator is a gifted percussionist, playing scads of different instruments to accompany each different relative.  It's rhythmic, cadenced, lovely descriptive language (all the instruments and music styles are named), and each family member has their own distinct style and appearance.  It's perfect - other than getting a smidge tired of a large family: father, mother, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, great grandma, cousin, and niece.


Uptown
Bryan Collier
ISBN: 0805057218
Rich, multi-layered collages of highly-textured photographs show off Harlem through a boy's eyes.

Our narrator tells us about various slices of life and environment Uptown - the brownstones, the barbershops, the Apollo Theatre, playing at Rutgers in summer, and listening to the Boy's Choir sing in the evenings, sharing his joy and pride in his homeplace of Uptown Harlem.  I love it specifically for my rural/suburban southern kids because it shows off a joyful and positive impression of city life.


Max and the Tag-Along Moon
Floyd Cooper
ISBN: 9780399233425
Truly lovely grainy-textured sepia-washed spreads of color and shadow.

It's early evening, and the moon rises as Max says goodbye to his beloved Granpa, who reassures the sad boy that the moon will "always shine for you" through the night.  During the long drive, beautifully illustrated and lyrically narrated, Max keeps a delighted eye on the tag-along moon that follows him around curves, through forests, and waits for him at the end of tunnels.  By the end of the trip, clouds have rolled in, and the stars - and moon - vanish from sight.  Max feels the loss of the moon keenly, and rolls it up with how he feels missing his Granpa, and is sad and lonely as he arrives home and prepares for bed.  But just before he falls asleep, the clouds roll back, and that loyal moon shines bright in his window, just like Granpa said it would.  Beautiful, sweet, and expressionistic.