Nothing Special
4.39(111 readers)
Selected as a Top Ten Children's Book of 2022 by the New York Public Library; a selection of Social Justice Books (a Teach for Change project); Winner of the 2023 Paterson Prize Books for Young People; selected by the Association for Library Service to Children to their 2023 Summer Reading List; Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist!
A buddy story that spans generations, and a love letter to the Black family connections that survive the Great Migration.
Six-year-old Jax can’t wait to leave Detroit and spend a week with his grandparents in coastal Virginia, where he’s sure he’ll be spoiled with the kinds of special things he enjoys at toys, movies, and hamburgers. As he dreams of the adventures he’ll have, his PopPop has other ideas. He fills their days with timeless summer fun—crabbing, shucking corn, and counting fireflies.
Illustrated entirely of repurposed textiles, Nothing Special celebrates the enduring connection between the generations who stayed in the South and the millions of emigrants for whom it will always be home. Between 1910 and 1970, more than six million African Americans left the Jim Crow South, but they never forgot the culture, the land, and the family they left behind. In the decades since, it has become a summer ritual for many black families to reverse the journey and return South for a visit to their homeplaces.
A buddy story that spans generations, and a love letter to the Black family connections that survive the Great Migration.
Six-year-old Jax can’t wait to leave Detroit and spend a week with his grandparents in coastal Virginia, where he’s sure he’ll be spoiled with the kinds of special things he enjoys at toys, movies, and hamburgers. As he dreams of the adventures he’ll have, his PopPop has other ideas. He fills their days with timeless summer fun—crabbing, shucking corn, and counting fireflies.
Illustrated entirely of repurposed textiles, Nothing Special celebrates the enduring connection between the generations who stayed in the South and the millions of emigrants for whom it will always be home. Between 1910 and 1970, more than six million African Americans left the Jim Crow South, but they never forgot the culture, the land, and the family they left behind. In the decades since, it has become a summer ritual for many black families to reverse the journey and return South for a visit to their homeplaces.
Publisher
Wayne State University Press
Publication Date
10/4/2022
ISBN
9780814349755
Pages
40
Categories
About the Author
Desiree Cooper
In Know the Mother, Cooper explores how sexism and racism continue to uncoil in the midst of life's most intimate moments. A former journalist and Pulitzer Prize-nominated columnist for the Detroit Free Press, Cooper uses the compressed form of "flash fiction" to tell an entire story. Slipping between poetry and prose, the 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow takes the reader to places where race and gender are unexpected interlopers--from a traditional Japanese market where a black woman shops with her newborn, to a law office where a woman miscarries during a conference call, to the middle of the night when spirits arrive for dinner.
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