The Extraordinary Life of Rosa Parks
by Dr. Shelia Kanani
Illustrated by Nan Lawson
Book Cover Picture:
Category: Informational or Biographical
Target Age Group: Ages 7-12, grades 3-7
Format: Paperback
Summary: This book follows the life of Rosa Parks from birth to death. It depicts events in her life leading up to her famous arrest when she refused to stand up on the bus to allow white people to take her seat. It then goes further in her story to show all the amazing things she did after that fated event.
Justification: The Extraordinary Life of Rosa Parks is published by Kane Miller and distributed by Usborne Books. This company finds its way into many homes through in person direct sales and a lot of families will have access to these books.
Review:
This review will examine the illustrations,the layout of the book and the lasting impact.
The illustrations, and text, in this book are all done in a teal blue. The contracts of the blue against the white is entertaining and engaging since it is so different from most books that you read. It is interesting that they chose to do everything in this blue, which takes the skin color of the characters and make everyone look relatively the same. This makes more of an impact when talking about segregation in this context, but we are all humans. As the book progresses through Rosa Parks life and timeline, the pictures depict her ageing. The artist did a great job of showing the lapse in times.
The layout of this book is really fun! There is the main story of her life on every page. The text changes and highlights important words in the story so kids can take note of these important tidbits. There are also many times in her life that intersect with other famous events. She meets and works with Martin Luther King, Jr., and she works with the Scottsboro Boys. In these instances, little "did you know" banners pop up and give you a little more information about those other important features that intersected with her life. There is also vocabulary bubbles for more challenging words that are important to story that define the word. For example "bigoted means prejudice." I really appreciated the extra context to make her story easier to understand and know what an impact she made.
Along with the extra tidbits and the vocabulary lessons, this book has several places where it asks the readers questions. I really love a book that makes you think and welcomed the thought provoking questions. This book will leave young readers thinking about Civil Rights and wanting to read more about the other people that we meet on Rosa Parks journey.
Overall it was well done, easy to ready and through provoking. I rate it a 4 out of 5 stars.
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