CITY SUMMER, COUNTRY SUMMER: An Intimate Look At Ordinary Life

One of the more challenging things to help young writers learn is the power of writing "small moments". Early writers want to share adventures and magical tales, rockets and dragons. Those are fantastic topics and need more encouragement than they sometimes are given. Even so, few children are as emotionally affected by dragons as they are by small moments in their personal lives. Moments of joy or worry or loss or celebration. Reading and writing those stories from their own experiences provide insights and inner processing of the emotional landscape of daily life. 

During BLACK HISTORY MONTH, and beyond, many of the picture books that so wonderfully reveal major moments in our American history focus on "big" events and eras in our shared experiences. I've reviewed many of those, HERE, HERE, and HERE, for example. There is value in providing accessible stories that too often were untold or even denied. The BIG parts of history need to be shared and understood. 

KOKILA, 2025

 CITY SUMMER, COUNTRY SUMMER, written by Kiese Laymon and illustrated by Alexis Franklin, reveals a ubiquitous history of small summer moments with heart and joy. The faces on the cover only hint at the experiences of the boys portrayed, two local brothers in Mississippi and one New York City boy, all spending the summer next door to each other with relatives. 

Mississippi native Mildred D. Taylor's award-winning middle grade novels explored this multi-generational pattern often. After the Great Migration into Northern States, families would send children South during summers to visit and learn from extended family. This may not be the first picture book to examine this cultural pattern through a  contemporary Black lens, but I have not found others. 

The voice is a slightly reflective first person approach to the process of meeting, measuring, befriending, puzzling, and recognizing "safeness" in the others. Not safety, but safeness. A recognition of themselves in the others, for saying both "I love you" and "I am afraid" to the others without risking the spoken words. The vibrant colors, the glowing skin, the dense but nearly monstrous garden, the perspective of overhead smiling adult faces, hands spraying their bodies with water, the slides down a hillside all say what words dare not. 

Don't come to this thinking it is some kind of City Mouse/Country Mouse parallel, or that it is a series of "summer fun" antics, fun for the sake of fun. There are shadows of both, in this tentatively tender relationship story. But those elements only serve the bigger picture of young folks with dark skin who have lived in a world in which caution is an essential skill. The story and their adventures reveal the process of  exploring trust in a potentially hurtful world. 

Please read this. Experience the lively scenes and read the text several times. Find and feel the  layers of simple statements and underlying emotions and hopes. You will come away enriched.

And, perhaps, awakened.

Teacher friends who read this book will recognize wonderful mentor text for writing small moments.