Books like When I Was Young in the Mountains
By Cynthia Rylant
For the kid who wants to hear about your own childhood again and again, this book turns simple memories into something worth sitting still for. Quiet, warm, nostalgic, unhurried.
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 girl and her grandmother gather salmon, herring eggs, and berries across the seasons on their island home, singing to the land as it sings back to them.
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 parent shares a string of tender wishes for a child — to find wonder in flying birds, to know love as vast and constant as the moon loves the sky.
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.
On the night of the Chinese Moon Festival, a young girl eats mooncakes and drinks tea with her parents while they share ancient legends about the moon — a woodcutter, a magical tree, and the Jade Rabbit who lives there.
A boy tags along for a Friday night shift at the school where his dad works as a custodian, shooting baskets in the half-lit gym and sweeping the stage while the rest of the city sleeps.
A father and child wake before dawn and head into the mountains for a day of hiking, facing the wilderness together and even helping the forest along the way.
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 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.
A family leaves the comfortable, familiar house they love and moves somewhere new, discovering that home is really the people you share it with.
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.
