Grandma and Me

PreS-K–This tender board book celebrates the love between grandmothers and their grandchildren in African American families. Gentle rhyming couplets follow babies, toddlers, and slightly older children engaged in a host of delightful daily activities such as dancing, reading, and baking. Corrin portrays the grandmothers as a joyful and energetic group with bodies of all shapes and sizes—some fat, some thin, some tall, some short. One uses a wheelchair. The layering of the bright yellows, pinks, purples, greens, and browns creates a pleasingly loose, screen-printed aesthetic. Some of the adult-child duos are situated in clearly defined environments, while others revel against abstracted planes of color. Weatherford’s everyday vignettes evince a profound and enduring familial bond. To underscore this connection, Corrin depicts many of the grandmothers with the same poses and facial expressions as the children in their care.