Freedom Like Sunlight: Praisesongs for Black Americans - Hardcover

The author of nearly 40 picture books, poet and storyteller J. Patrick Lewis has been delighting readers young and old for more than two decades. His books, which include Freedom Like Sunlight, The Last Resort, and The Stolen Smile, have won numerous awards and wide acclaim.

Gr. 5-12. Stunning illustrations by John Thompson take center stage in this attractively designed poetry collection that pays homage to legendary African Americans including Sojourner Truth, Arthur Ashe, and Rosa Parks. Using a range of styles and meter, the mostly rhyming poems are dramatic and reverential, but they evoke the spirit of their subjects and reference events in their remarkable lives without seeming overtly biographical or didactic. The simplest selections are often the best, their beautiful images not overwhelmed by the tribute: in "Baby Contralto," about Marian Anderson, "She brushed / her voice / Across the air / In colors / Not seen / Anywhere. / In colors / Beautiful / And strong. / She brushed / The air. . . / And painted song." But it's the radiant paintings, including a head-turning jacket portrait of the young Malcolm X, that will captivate a wide range of children and encourage repeated readings. Full-page, realistic images, elegantly balanced opposite poems on stark white backgrounds, powerfully capture the subjects in a mix of traditional portraiture, group scenes, and still life (the illustration for the poem about Langston Hughes, for example, shows only a sunlit desk with a typewriter, a coffee cup, an ashtray, and a smoking cigarette). Extensive biographical notes conclude a fine collection that can be used across the curriculum. Gillian Engberg
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