Books like My Baba's Garden
By Jordan Scott
For families who share a home or a garden across generations, this is the quiet morning routine your child already knows by heart, rendered tender and true. Quiet, tender, wistful, grounded in small daily rituals.
A six-year-old boy spends his days in his grandfather Luis's towering garden, learning bird names, playful expressions, and reading and writing from a grandfather who never had schooling of his own.
Twelve poems follow one family through a full year, from January sledding to July fireworks to autumn leaves underfoot, finding wonder in each month's particular light and weather.
A young girl feeling as gray as a pigeon on a rainy Saturday joins her busy mom on a trip to their favorite Chinatown store, gathering produce, seafood, and spices for a family dinner.
A great-grandson wanders through his grandfather's topiary garden, where hedges shaped like a farmboy, a soldier, and a chickenpox-covered kid retell a whole lifetime one memory at a time.
A poor washerwoman on the island of Martinique uses her mother's magic wand to help her beloved goddaughter Cendrillon win the heart of a rich man's son.
A young man leaves Japan to explore California, falls in love with both places, and spends his life torn between two homelands he can never fully choose between.
On a moonlit night, a childless couple discovers a dozen tiny babies scattered in a meadow after a magical moonshower, and takes them in to raise as their own.
After their father dies, six-year-old Marvel, her seven siblings, and their mother move into a run-down tar-paper shack deep in the Wisconsin woods and slowly turn it into a home.
A boy and his father fish before dawn at a Minneapolis pond, not for sport but for food, while stories of a different pond back in Vietnam quietly surface between casts.
A little girl longs to play with the moon, so her father sets off with a very long ladder to bring it down to her — however small he must wait for it to become.
A boy travels north with his grandfather, Moshom, to see the trapline where Moshom grew up, asking again and again, "Is this your trapline?" as he imagines the life his grandfather once lived there.
A carload of relatives drives all the way from Virginia in a rainbow-colored station wagon for a summer visit full of hugging, garden-tending, and porch music that ends, happily, with a promise to return.
