Grandparents Song

Grandparents Song

From Booklist K-Gr. 3. In rhyming text with a pleasant refrain, Hamanaka celebrates ancestry and diversity as she tells of a girl with green eyes and free-flowing black hair who traces her genealogy back through her grandparents. The girl first describes her maternal line, her mother and her Native American grandmother, who married a railroad worker with "eyes of green." She then turns to her paternal grandmother, who rode a jaguar across the Rio Grande, and to her grandfather's people crossing "the great sea / Their bodies were chained, but their souls fought free." "My roots run deep," reads the text, and the illustrations reflect tree imagery-- sometimes in birch tree borders, sometimes in depictions of massive trees. Clues in the girl's words and hints in the art, especially in the magnificent borders, which range from Celtic bas-relief to Native American beadwork, give little ones insight into the girl's ancestry. Connie FletcherCopyright