ALA Notable Children's Books for Younger Readers, part 1

Each year the Association of Library Services for Children, a division of the ALA, publishes its list of Notable Books for Children. This year's list can be found here, and I am currently reading through them as quickly as I can get them from the library. Two of my favorites so far are Back of the Bus by Aaron Reynolds, illustrated by Floyd Cooper, and Grandma's Gift by Eric Velasquez, illustrated by the author, who received a Pura Belpre Award for the illustrations.

Back of the Bus is about a young African American boy who was sitting in the back of the bus, where he thought he belonged, with his mother in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. He amused himself by rolling a marble, a "brown and golden" marble, back and forth up the bus aisle. Once he rolled it so far that he couldn't retrieve it, only to have it sent back to him by "Mrs. Parks from the tailor shop."

The boy puts the marble in his pocket at his mother's command, and the bus moves. The boy notes that the adults have "tired, worked all day eyes and strong chins" and that they were cramming in the bus "like lima beans." Then suddenly the bus stopped, and didn't get going again. The boy questioned what was happening, only to be shushed by his mother, and heard the driver saying that he was going to call the police. And he sees Mrs. Parks with "eyes all fierce like a lightnin' storm," and he realized that maybe neither she, nor he or his mother, belonged in the back of the bus after all.

The last image was of the boy taking his marble out of his pocket, and letting it shine in the sunlight, because "it ain't gotta hide no more."

In Grandma's Gift, the narrator discusses spending Christmas break with his grandmother in El Barrio while his parents worked. His grandmother, who was originally from Puerto Rico and did not speak English, normally did not venture out of El Barrio, where she knew everyone and everyone knew her. The description of the narrator going with her to buy food, and then her making pasteles, made me hungry just reading it.

This year, however, the grandmother needed to venture out of El Barrio, because the narrator had an assignment to view a painting on the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The grandmother took the narrator to the museum, albeit nervously. She had him translate all the signs and captions under the paintings--until they came to the assigned painting. The grandmother said, "Oye Juan de Pareja, que haces tu ahi?" The grandmother had recognized the famous painter as someone she had learned about as a child in Puerto Rico.

For Christmas Eve, the grandmother gave the narrator a sketchbook and a set of colored pencils, which, with the impressive painting of Juan de Pareja, set him on the journey to becoming an artist himself.