#ReadSoulLit Photo Challenge – Day 3

Bookish Stuff / Tuesday, February 3rd, 2015

Day 3 – Young Adult/Middle-Grade:

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These two genres don’t usually attract me at all.  I just get a little bored reading them at times so I don’t set out to read them at all.  However, The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 is a book I missed.  It was published in 1995 so ahem!, so I was  older.  I was old enough not to have this one on my radar.  Photo challenges have this way of getting avid readers like me to dig deep.  I found this one on my shelves neglected.  It was originally given to me in a bag of used books that someone wanted to discard.  I love discarded books because I always seem to find treasures inside of them.  This book won a 1996 Newberry Honor and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award.  Christopher Paul Curtis has written many other middle-grade/Young Adult awarded novels, like Bud, not Buddy, Elijah of Buxton, The Mighty Miss Malone, among others.

The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963  is “A wonderful middle-grade novel narrated by Kenny, 9, about his middle-class black family, the Weird Watsons of Flint, Michigan. When Kenny’s 13-year-old brother, Byron, gets to be too much trouble, they head South to Birmingham to visit Grandma, the one person who can shape him up. And they happen to be in Birmingham when Grandma’s church is blown up.” (description from iTunes Books)

6 Replies to “#ReadSoulLit Photo Challenge – Day 3”

  1. “Slam” by Walter Dean Myers – A very realistic book about a young man’s basketball dreams. Hence the title “Slam” Gregory’s nickname. But it’s also about being responsible and deciding at an early age to make the sacrifices to achieve your dreams. I love that W.D.M. writes books that encourage young men to think about and take control of their lives. A wonderful coming of age story.