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.

Tuesday Storytime: Black History Month, Children

I don't like to make a big deal out of Black History Month for my storytimes, but I do feel like I ought to at least reference major national observances just like I do holidays.  My usual approach is to simply select my usual storytime themes, but to limit my titles to those with obviously Black illustrated characters.  This means that I don't often do biographies of famous people, or "issues" stories very often, and I wonder sometimes if most people even recognize that I'm doing it, since I don't mention the Month during storytime at all.  On the one hand, that feels a little stealthy, but on the other, I like that I can actually DO a storytime about bedtime or families or city life without it having to be explicitly a "Black" story.

Little Monster
Barrie Wade, illustrated by Katinka Kew
ISBN: 0688095976
Mandy overhears her mom praising her for being good, but when everyone laughs about "little monster" Jimmy, she reconsiders.

I really like this story because it perfectly illustrates how kids overhear and interpret adult interactions, molding their behavior to gain a specific reaction or to empirically prove their ideas true or not.  Mandy is up late one night and overhears her mom praising her for being good, but when her brother Jimmy gets multiple laughs for being a "little monster," Mandy isn't so sure that being good is all it's cracked up to be.  The next day she's a holy terror in the most innocent of ways - sticking out tongues, minor direct disobedience, general acting-out, and by the end of the night, mom snaps and calls Mandy a "little monster," but mom being the bright sort, figures out immediately what's up, and reassures Mandy that love and affection and laughter are unconditional, whether a kid is a "little monster" or "good as gold."  Very sweet, but some families might be a bit uncomfortable that Mandy isn't punished for any of her "bad" behavior.


Ten, Nine, Eight
Molly Bang
ISBN: 0688009069
One of my favorite bedtime books.  A sweet father and daughter go through a countdown rhyme as she prepares for bed.

Previously reviewed here.  Always delightful, and even though I did it quite recently, it's a perfect middle book because of the very short narrative.


Please, Baby, Please
Spike Lee & Tonya Lewis Lee, illustrated by Kadir Nelson
ISBN: 0689832338
Adorable toddler is front and center in oversize, child's-eye-view illustrations.

This one isn't my favorite to read, and I hate that.  I LOVE the illustrations, and the "baby" is delightfully expressive and perfectly a toddler, getting into things and being entranced by things - just absolutely beautiful work by Nelson, and I really adore the loving attention he paid to details.  But, the narrative is 60% comprised of the words "please" and "baby" arranged in different orders as thus: "please, baby baby, please" or "baby baby baby please" "baby please, baby baby" etc.  Which is not only repetitive, but difficult for the reader.  It's not enough to keep me from doing it every once in a while, but it's absolutely enough to keep this book off my favorites list, which is a crying shame.