kiddieliter

The Watsons Go to Birmingham is a comical story told through the eyes of nine year old Kenny. Kenny’s older brother is becoming and handful so the Watsons decide to take a road trip from Flint, Michigan to Alabama to visit Kenny’s grandmother. Kenny’s grandmother is said to be the one who can straighten his older brother out. This book is set in 1963 during the Civil Rights movement and depicts the trials that African Americans faced at that time. Although it was a rough time, through Kenny’s eyes, a wonderful story is told and a bit of history is released to the reader.

Nowadays it’s no big deal or a girl to travel seventy-five miles. But when Charlotte May Pierstorff wanted to cross seventy-five miles of Idaho mountains to see her grandma in 1914, it was a very big deal indeed. There was no highway except the railroad, and a train ticket would have cost her parents a full day’s pay. This book tells the exciting adventure of how May was ‘mailed’ to her grandmother’s house.

Two children discover an arrowhead, and a broken china cup wondering what life was life 300 years ago.  The author takes you back through the years on that same land before that house was built showing you what life was life and what those people had to go through to get back to where they were in present time.

  Harriet Tubman is a woman who talks to God and hears His voice in the whip-poor-will’s song and the owl’s screech, and sees His face in the reflection of the moon on the creek, and in other forms of nature as He directs her away from the inhumane treatment inflicted upon her as a slave at the mercy of a cruel master and toward being the Moses of her people as a conductor in the Underground Railroad.  The Underground Railroad consisted of sites that offered safe havens for runaway slaves on their flight to freedom in the North and were operated by abolitionists, people who wanted to legally do away with slavery because they felt that it was inherently wrong.

Prayers and Negro spirituals were important in the lives of the enslaved, as in Harriet’s life.  The prayers provided direction and solace and the spirituals contained words which were codes understood only by the oppressed.

When Harriet arrived in Philadelphia, the freedom which had been granted to her through God’s guidance was instrumental in her quest to return to the South and lead her family to the freedom that she now enjoyed.  She would make many more treks back to the South and would lead as many as three hundred slaves to freedom. 

This powerfully written Caldecott Honor book features some of Harriet Tubman’s possible conversations with God.  It also allows the reader to learn of the guiding force that directs one’s life when he or she allows himself or herself to be used in the way that God sees fit.  Athough this book is only a fictionalized account of a factual and historical truth, the author’s note at the end provides a brief and accurate biographical sketch of Harriet Tubman’s life. 

  The lives of the mountain people in the Appalachian region of the United States are chronicled in this book.  The author was reared in West Virginia in the 1960’s; this allows her to write from an intimate perspective in a way that allows an outsider to become knowledgeable of the customs and everyday existence of the people.  Their love for their dogs and their penchant for remaining in the area without regard for the trappings of the world that exists beyond the mountains are alluded to.  She speculates that perhaps the mountains, which seem to block them from the outside world, play a part in their seeming malaise toward change.  Many of those who do leave and acquire a professional education and employment almost always return.  They, though, are unable to explain why they come back.

Coal mining, the main job for generations of fathers and sons, leaves its mark on the lives of the people, even down to the coal dust which settles on the sides of the houses.  Many of these houses do not have modern amenities, including running water; this makes having a functional inside bathroom impossible.  Bodily eliminations are done in little buildings called outhouses.

The author also reveals their religious denominational preferences and their reluctance to meet new people.  She does state, however, that they will assist newcomers in many ways once they become familiar with them.

The author effectively conveys the everyday existence of Applachians, whose lives revolve around the looming mountains and the changing of the seasons which dictate the preparations necessary to exist in their seemingly cloistered world.