The Baby on the Way
By Karen English; Sean Qualls (Illustrator)
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), Hardcover, 9780374373610, 32pp.)
Publication Date: October 2005
Categories: Family - Multigenerational, Family - New Baby, People & Places - United States - African-American
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By the Coretta Scott King Honor author
In an urban rooftop garden, a young African American boy named Jamal initiates an intriguing conversation with his grandmother when he asks her if she was ever a baby. Turns out Grandma was even once ?the baby on the way,? and she proceeds to tell the story of her birth, the tenth child in a poor farming family. As she discusses the events and traditions that accompanied her welcome to the world, from the fetching of the midwife to a folkways ritual of drinking water from a thimble, vivid, expressionistic paintings from a talented new illustrator evoke the past.
Karen English is the author of many children?s books, including Speak to Me (And I Will Listen between the Lines), which was a School Library Journal Best Book of 2004. She lives in Richmond, California.
This is Sean Qualls?s first book. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
"Grandma offers to tell [Jamal] about when he was the baby on the way - and what young listeners won't want to hear their own versions of that story?" -- Kirkus Reviews "Delightful.? ?Chicago Tribune "The intimate artwork, in earth colors with pencil-thin line details, shows the loving bond between family members stretching back in time and into the future." -- Booklist "This is a gentle, sentimental book that addresses an age-old question and the curiosity that children have about their grandparents." -- School Library Journal "A solemn spiritual, whose resolution lies less in the possibility of joy than in the quieter peace of enduring." --The New York Times Book Review "The storytelling has all the character and tenderness of a real grandmother's style." -- The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
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