Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis.
This book won a Newbery Medal in 2000, the same year that Curtis won the Coretta Scott King Award. Ten-year-old Bud is an orphan living in foster care in Flint, Michigan in 1936. He has decided to walk to Grand Rapids in order to find the jazz musician whom he believes to be his father. Along Bud's Journey the reader sees several typical aspects of the time period--Hoovervilles, people jumping trains in order to go to another city to find work, racism backed by the law. But he also finds help and friendship, from a train conductor named Lefty Lewis, and the members of the band traveling with the jazz musician, Hermann E. Calloway.
Calloway is harsh with Bud and refuses to recognize him as his son, but Calloway is also not what he seems. He collects rocks from his concerts and writes the dates and locations on them. Detroit, Michigan, 2/5/11. He had once offered to bring his daughter a gift from a concert, thinking she might want a dress or a doll. She asked for "a wock, Daddy. A wock." He kept collecting the rocks, hoping he would see her again.
And two that I've blogged about before:
The First Part Last by Angela Johnson:
A teenage boy raises his infant daughter after her mother is comatose due to eclampsia. So many books focus on teenage mothers; I enjoyed seeing one focusing on the father.
Winner of the Coretta Scott King Award in 2004.
The Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon:
I recently recommended this to fourth graders looking for historical fiction books but warned them that I can't read it without crying. Two brothers during the Civil Rights Movement, one following Dr. King's philosophy of peaceful protest like their father, the other, the more aggressive philosophies of Malcolm X. This can't end well, and it doesn't.
Winner of the John Steptoe Award in 2010.
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