Each Kindness
by Jacqueline Woodson, Illustrated by E. B. Lewis
Nancy Paulsen Books, 2012
Picture book
Ages 5-8, Grades K – 3
ISBN: 978-0399246524
Honors:
Jane Addams Children’s Book Award * Coretta Scott King Honor Book * Charlotte Zolotow Award * School Library Journal Best Book of 2012 * Pennsylvania Young Readers’ Choice Award
Each Kindness is a story of growth and regret told from the perspective of Chloe, a young girl who refuses to accept small gestures of friendship from Maya, the new girl at school.
Maya wears spring shoes in the snow and plays alone, snubbed by classmates who laugh and name her “Never New” for her hand-me-down wardrobe. Yet she continually reaches out, extending a glance, a smile, some jacks, a ball–ever optimistic that one day her affection will be returned. It never is. Chloe and her classmates turn their backs and refuse to smile at Maya.
One day, when Maya is absent from school, their teacher gives a lesson in compassion. She drops a small stone into a bowl of water, observes the ripples, and says, “This is what kindness does. Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.”
Chloe is moved and resolves to be kind and make the world better by simply returning Maya’s smile. But her realization comes too late, and Chloe’s left to grapple with the sting of kindnesses withheld.
-MPS
Brown Girl Dreaming
by Jacqueline Woodson
Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014
Middle grade, memoir, poetry
Ages 10 and up
Honors: National Book Award for Young People’s Literature * Newbery Honor * Coretta Scott King Author Book Award * Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Excellence in Children’s Literature * NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature
Jacqueline Woodson recalls a childhood spanning Ohio, South Carolina, and New York toward the end of the Jim Crow era and the rise of the Civil Rights movement.
Through a child’s eyes, the story revisits a grandmother’s tired feet and strong faith, downtown sit-ins, and lingering WHITES ONLY signs. This memoir-in-verse summons the reliable tonality of her maternal grandfather’s daily return from work and his grandchildren’s wild, loving sprint to greet him. The pages reminisce over a familial landscape where the Greenville air speaks to a thoughtful child through the twinkle of lightning bugs, scents of pine, and wet grass and a never-ending serenade of crickets.
Brown Girl Dreaming illuminates how deeply childhood is shaped by history, family, faith, and place and how often children are called upon to build bridges between the past and the future, trials and triumphs. – Gigi
If You Come Softly
By Jacqueline Woodson
Young adult
Puffin, 1998
ISBN: 0698118626/ ISBN: 978-0698118621
Awards/Recognitions: * ALA Best Books for Young Adults * Detroit Public Library Author’s Day Award
An Audre Lorde poem inspired this 1998 love story by Jacqueline Woodson. Lorde’s poem begins:
If you come softly
as the wind within the trees
you may hear what I hear
see what sorrow sees
Woodson published If You Come Softly fifteen years ago, yet every page reads like a contemporary love stoy. It’s told from the alternating perspectives of Ellie and Miah, who are both fifteen, both upper middle class, both students at a mostly white private New York City high school. Only Ellie is white and Miah is black. While Ellie and Miah live in the same city and attend the same school, their cultural and familial life-experiences are completely different.
The young couple’s willingness to enter into and explore these differences leads them to fall in love and to stand up on behalf of their love when society and even their families try to put them down. If You Come Softly is not a true-love-is-blind story but a true-love-is-pliable-and-open story.
If You Come Softly overflows with that tingly first-love magic. Sweaty palms, stolen kisses, long late night calls, dreamy hours of wondering when. We all know that to love anyone or anything is to offer up your heart for the breaking. The Lorde poem reminds us that the deepest possible connection with another being will include suffering, for such intimacy allows us to “see what sorrow sees”. Within Woodson’s title, even, we know that sooner or later Ellie and Miah and their families will also see what sorrow sees.
Fortunately for her readers, when Jacqueline Woodson breaks your heart, she does so to make it more like Ellie and Miah’s love: pliable, ready, and able to receive all the goodness of the world in whatever shape, form, or color it’s offered. GA
Read the Girls of Summer interview with Jacqueline Woodson here.
Visit Jacqueline Woodson’s website: http://jacquelinewoodson.com/
This is not your school's summer reading list 