Grimes uses different styles of poem for each voice (free verse for the daughter and tanka poems for the mother), a choice that she discusses in an explanatory note on poetry forms that will serve budding poets and teachers alike. Sweet and accessible but never simplistic, this collection captures the experience of a military childhood with graceful sophistication. The daughter’s poems compare her and her grown-up mother’s lives with the experiences detailed by Mama as a girl (“It’s funny to think of Mama/making a mess with arts and crafts”). Her writing also touches upon painful situations, such as leaving her friends behind when she moved and missing her father when he was away. An air force brat, Mama wrote a different entry in each new place her family was stationed, showcasing the experiences of her “childhood on wings,” from painting luminarias in New Mexico to kayaking in Virginia to catching cherry blossoms like snowflakes in Japan.
Each subsequent set of pages pairs a poem written by the girl with one by her mama. Elizabeth Zunon’s warm, bright illustrations provide a cheerful balance, but it’s the ache of a parent’s absence that most powerfully animates the book.ĭuring a visit to Grandma’s, a seven-year-old girl discovers a stash of poems in the attic written by her mother as a child.
Through reading her mother’s poems, the girl realizes how much she misses her after just three days. We see the mother as a young girl in Texas, Japan and Germany, sharing adventures with her own father when he’s on leave and missing him when he is not. The little girl follows her mother’s many moves around the world as an “Air Force Brat,” as the girl’s first poem is titled. The result is a story that conveys decades of family history with an almost magical concision.
#POEMS ABOUT GROWING UP FOR GIRLS FREE#
On each lefthand page, Grimes (“Chasing Freedom,” “Words With Wings”) has her narrator write in short bursts of free verse, while on the right-side pages the poems her mother wrote are in the Japanese five-line formtanka.
Succinct poetry shines in this impassioned celebration of history the stories of this African-American family traveling the globe are rich with heart and color.Ī 7-year-old girl, exploring in Grandma’s attic, finds a box of poems her mother wrote as a child. According to her author’s note, Grimes drew on the varied stories of friends who grew up as military brats to create this imagined intergenerational dialogue. Using free verse for the young girl’s poems and tanka for her mother’s, master poet Nikki Grimes creates a tender intergenerational story that speaks to every child’s need to hold onto special memories of home, no matter where that place might be.Ī girl discovers her mother’s childhood poems in her grandmother’s attic and embarks on a journey through family history that inspires her own poetic tribute to her mother. And when she returns her mother’s poems to the box in the attic, she leaves her own poems too, for someone else to find, someday. To let her mother know this, she creates a gift: a book with her own poems and copies of her mother’s.
Reading the poems and sharing those experiences through her mother’s eyes, the young girl feels closer to her mother than ever before. Over the years, her mother used poetry to record her experiences in the many places the family lived. Her mother’s family often moved around the United States and the world because her father was in the Air Force. New York City Dept of Education National Poetry Month recommendationĪbout the Book During a visit to her grandma's house, a young girl discovers a box of poems in the attic, poems written by her mother when she was growing up. When I was in about ten or eleven I stayed in overnight at a friend of my parents We heard heavy grunting, walls banging and bed squeaking goings on from the room across from us next door The younger girls freaking out and tried to distract us older girls from hearing all of that by talking out loudly and turning the volume all the way up on our TV.Buy this book at your favorite bookseller:īank Street College Best Children’s Books of the Year 2016
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