This is a splendid book. The poetic form is just right as Traci Dant recounts the story of her family reunions in Missouri. The illustrations by Eric Velasquez are colorful and lush, detailed and like small paintings that could stand alone. This would be a great book for families to read together.

This book would be a good choice for a unit on celebrations/holidays since it takes place on Mother's Day weekend. It would be a good choice to look at how families share and cooperate to accommodate one another. It's a fine example of using poetry to tell a story, so it could be a good fit in a poetry unit. It's a good book on family and family values as well. ( )

Poetic :) ( )

This children’s picture book uses short prose-poems and full-color oil-on-linen illustrations to tell the story of an African-American family reunion in the Midwest -- the social activities that you can see, and the underlying love … that, it turns out, you can actually see, too. It’s narrated in the perspective of a 10(ish)-year-old boy, though the voice and the details call a girl/an adult much more to mind -- which is fine, because that may be you, reading this book to a child. More than a book about how fun a reunion is, this is about how important family is.

(Review based on a copy of the book provided by the publisher.) ( )

This book features fifteen poems, all beginning with the line “Must be some kind of love…” It is the story of a family’s summer reunion at Grandma’s house as told by a young boy, and how love makes all the difference. As his daddy says:

"Must be some kind of love
that stretches
that widens
that changes

Aunt Lois’s two-bedroom
one-bathroom house
into space large enough
to hold 100 people for a fish fry.

Daddy say, Love makes this place
big enough.
so nobody says,
I got nowhere to sit.

I got nowhere to eat.
I got nowhere to set my hat.
So nobody says, It’s too loud
or we’re too many."

This love turns a stranger into a cousin-friend for the boy, and makes his “work-hard Daddy laugh like he’ll never have to janitor all night and farm all day again.”

All the poems are accompanied by warm oils by Eric Valasquez.

"Must be some kind
of love that makes
Uncle Maurice dig
into his worn pocket
and pull out a whole
five dollars for me. He says,
Son, you done real good.
Just ‘cause I won second
in last year’s spelling bee.”

Evaluation: I read through this story numerous times, wanting to savor the warmth and love and pride that characterized the people described by the poems and pictures. I can see young children doing the same! ( )