Publishers Weekly
★ 09/02/2024
Previous collaborators and National Book Award winners Colvin and Hoose reteam to relate the actions of a young Claudette Colvin (b. 1939) in reaction to segregation in Montgomery, Ala. Crisp text based in lived experience recounts how the protagonist “always asked big questions,” including, as a child, “Why do white people think they’re better than me?” Detailing an era in which “signs... told me where I could and couldn’t go,” first-person narration asks another question: “I wanted change. But what could I do?” Colvin soon found out, inadvertently becoming a civil rights pioneer when, at age 15, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white woman, saying, “It’s my constitutional right to sit here!” Vibrant illustrations from Jackson (Summer Is Here) depict characters past and present with precision, from Colvin’s act (which occurred nine months before Rosa Parks’s protest) to the Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. It’s a telling both personal and historical that reflects the urgency and determination of the civil rights movement via the perspective of one figure working urgently toward equality and justice. An author’s note concludes. Ages 4–8. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
A Junior Library Guild Selection
★ “Vibrant illustrations from Jackson depict characters past and present with precision, from Colvin’s act (which occurred nine months before Rosa Parks’s protest) to the Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. It’s a telling both personal and historical that reflects the urgency and determination of the civil rights movement via the perspective of one figure working urgently toward equality and justice.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“A Civil Rights activist who sat on a bus before Rosa Parks did and paid the price tells her story . . . As well as honoring her as one of the earliest and last-surviving Civil Rights pioneers, the book might well inspire readers to take up Hoose’s closing suggestion to ask, ‘Is there a little Claudette in me?’ Courageous acts, long undersung but well worth remembering.” —Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
2024-08-03
A Civil Rights activist who sat on a bus before Rosa Parks did and paid the price tells her story.
Colvin and Hoose collaborated on a YA memoir in 2009 (Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice), but this boiled-down version preserves both major events—as a 15-year-old Montgomery resident in 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give up a bus seat and later participated in an Alabama lawsuit that succeeded in making racially segregated buses illegal in the state—and her claim to have inspired, but subsequently been overshadowed by, Parks. Jackson portrays her as a neatly dressed, studious-looking teen who sits stubbornly with the spirits of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth behind her while the white bus driver delivers an angry lecture; she then goes on to kneel fearfully in an empty cell after being manhandled by white police officers. Finally, she poses in forthright dignity before a panel of white judges as she delivers her testimony. What emerges most strongly from her account is her forceful conviction, undimmed through all the years since, that injustice must be fought: “Because you can’t just ask for change,” she writes. “You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’ Like I did.” As well as honoring her as one of the earliest and last-surviving Civil Rights pioneers, the book might well inspire readers to take up Hoose’s closing suggestion to ask, “Is there a little Claudette in me?”
Courageous acts, long undersung but well worth remembering. (note from Hoose)(Picture-book memoir. 6-8)
