By Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López
Paperback £7.99
This bright and beautiful picture book opens with kids who are stuck indoors during endless rain and can’t think of anything to do… this is the start of so many children’s books.
But this one is different. Grandmother helps the children fly using their imaginations, which take them to wonderful places. And this technique helps when they move to a new place, where it seems people don’t want to play with them.
Grandmother is drawing on the wisdom of the children’s ancestors, and as Jacqueline Woodson explains in the epilogue: “As a kid, I always wondered how people were able to survive through the horrors of enslavement. But they did. And they passed down their stories and their fables and their memories to the young people coming along after them. And these stories gave us wings.” As Grandmother says to her grandchildren: “nobody can ever cuff your beautiful and brilliant mind”.
The Year We Learned to Fly is an exceptional imaginative response to this moving setting. A book for keeps.
Review by Bethan