An entire book about daydreaming? It sounds too
good to be true, doesn’t it? Nikki Grimes’s junior fiction Words With Wings is a 2014 Coretta Scott King Honor book as well as
a beautifully written tribute to the importance of the imagination.
Gabby’s
favorite hobby has been daydreaming ever since her parents first began to fight
with each other. Words excite her, capture her fancy, and pull her along with
them to a thrilling place in her imagination – but sometimes at very
inconvenient times. Can she help it if her thoughts are more interesting than
setting the table or paying attention in class? Gabby’s mother and her teachers
seem to think so. When Gabby moves to a different school, she worries that the
other kids will think that her pastime is bizarre, or that her instructor will be
angry when her mind slips into space. Trying to stop herself from imagining
things seems to help her focus in class and at home, but Gabby is miserable. It
takes Mr. Spicer, her caring new teacher, to come up with an inventive solution
to show her and her class the true power of daydreaming.
Grimes’s
novel is written entirely in short, graceful, free-verse poems that use simple
but evocative phraseology to color Gabby’s flights of fancy. Often the author
takes one fairly commonplace word as the subject of an entire poem to show how
any object can be a thing of wonder. For instance, Gabby describes a waterfall
as “liquid thunder” and thinks about what it would be like to jump into the
pool all the way down at the waterfall’s end. In addition to its lovely verse,
the book adeptly handles the subjects of divorce, parental expectations,
friendship, and role models, making Grimes’s award-winner a truly worthy read.
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