A Card For My Father | TheBookSeekers

A Card For My Father


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No. of pages 40

Published: 2018

Great for age 7-10 years

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2019 White Raven Selection from the International Youth Library How can Flora complete her class assignment to make a Fathers Day card when shes never met her father? The first title in a trilogy of picture books exploring the lasting effects, big and small, of a fathers incarceration on his first-grade daughter, Flora. When Flora's class has to make Father's Day cards, she bonds with a classmate who also doesn't have a father and instead makes a card for President Obama. Desperate to know her father but afraid to ask her mother about him, Flora asks strangers and imagines myriad dads, but it's not until she asks her mother if she can send her father a card that Flora begins to understand, even if she doesn't quite know it yet. Graphic novel format perfect for young readers.

 

 

This book has been graded for interest at 6-11 years.

There are 40 pages in this book. This book was published in 2018 by Penny Candy Books .

Samantha Thornhill is a poet, educator, producer, and author of three children's books, including the poem in Odetta: The Queen of Folk. Her work has been published in over two-dozen literary journals and anthologies, such as The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. A performer on stages across the United States and internationally, she holds an MFA from the University of Virginia. Samantha has taught poetry to acting students at the Juilliard School. She also served as a writer-in-residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters, where she taught creative writing seminars to youth. A co-founder of Poets in Unexpected Places, which was profiled in the New York Times for their surprising pop-up poetry experiments all over New York City, Samantha also facilitates workshops for the Dialogue Arts Project, which ventures into professional settings and uses creative writing as a tool to navigate uncomfortable discussions about social identity. Samantha is a native of the twin island nation of Trinidad & Tobago and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Morgan Clement was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She always loved to draw as a child but didn't consider it to be a serious career option until high school when she attended a college preview program at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio. After graduating from high school, Morgan went on to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation at the Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah, Georgia. Through SCAD she was able to expand her skills and even got the opportunity to study abroad at SCAD's Hong Kong campus, studying both painting and illustration. She works as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator and loves to work on comic books and other forms of sequential art. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

"A child confronts feelings of exclusion and loss on Father's Day.

Flora Gardener, depicted in the comic-style art as a child of color with tight, dark curls and light brown, freckled skin, has never met her father. Her imagined vision of him in an inmate's uniform (deftly illustrated in line drawings that stand apart from the full-color art of the real world) later establishes that he's incarcerated. When her class makes cards in anticipation of a Daddy Day picnic, Flora is bereft, but she notices that Jonas, or "Bork," a white-appearing boy with blond hair, light skin, and blue eyes, seems sad, too. The teacher's efforts to make her feel included (suggesting she make a card for an uncle or a grandfather and inviting her to sit on her blanket at the picnic) underscore how unfair such exclusive activities are. The story doesn't reach full resolution and instead points readers toward an anticipated sequel, but it does depict Bork's decision to make a card for President Barack Obama since his father is dead and "the president is sort of everybody's dad" as well as the happy moment when Flora's mother comes to the picnic. Her mother's reticence about Flora's father is perhaps the most poignant story element, and readers will hope she will share more about him in the sequel.

The beginning of a needed story. " --Kirkus Reviews

"...brilliantly and beautifully told from the point-of-view of Flora Gardner, a little girl who has never met her father."--Raise Them Righteous