Even though I'm the Middle Grade Mafioso, there are gaps in my reading. (I know, what a shocker!) I'd never read anything by Christopher Paul Curtis, but that has been rectified now because my 4th-grader was reading The Watsons Go To Birmingham, 1963 for a class project, and we read it together. I loved it!
What It's About:
Enter the hilarious world of ten-year-old Kenny and his family, the Weird Watsons of Flint, Michigan. There's Momma, Dad, little sister Joetta, and brother Byron, who's thirteen and an "official juvenile delinquent." When Momma and Dad decide it's time for a visit to Grandma, Dad comes home with the amazing Ultra-Glide, and the Watsons set out on a trip like no other. They're heading South to Birmingham, Alabama, toward one of the darkest moments in America's history.
Opening Lines:
"It was one of those super-duper-cold Saturdays. One of those days that when you breathed out your breath kind of hung frozen in the air like a hunk of smoke and you could walk along and look exactly like a train bowing out big, fat, white puffs of smoke."
Things I Loved About It:
Well, first, my 4th-grader was captivated by it. It really has "all the feels" as they say. It's at times comic, at others pretty harrowing. The relationship between Kenny and his older brother Byron is complicated but, at the end, we see that Byron, despite all his adolescent demons, really has his eye out for his younger, more tender brother.
As a supporter of living parents in middle grade, this novel gets an 'A' from me. The parents are an integral part of their kids' lives (as parents really are in the majority of families) and they were also realistic characters.
The wider society might have been preoccupied with race relations at this time, but they are peripheral to Kenny (whose focus is mainly on his family and school, and trying to avoid bullies) until the scene in Birmingham (I won't spoil it for you) when the reality of what black Americans have had to face comes to the fore.
I'll let my 4th-grader have the final word: "It was entertaining. I could visualize what happened, and the time period."
About the Author: (from Random House Kids)
Born in Flint, Michigan, Christopher Paul Curtis spent his first 13 years after high school on the assembly line of Flint’s historic Fisher Body Plant #1. His job entailed hanging car doors, and it left him with an aversion to getting into and out of large automobiles—particularly big Buicks.
Curtis’s writing—and his dedication to it—has been greatly influenced by his family members. With grandfathers like Earl “Lefty” Lewis, a Negro Baseball League pitcher, and 1930s bandleader Herman E. Curtis, Sr., of Herman Curtis and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression, it is easy to see why Christopher Paul Curtis was destined to become an entertainer.
Christopher Paul Curtis made an outstanding debut in children’s s literature with The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963. His second novel, Bud, Not Buddy, is the first book ever to receive both the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Author Award.
Christopher Paul Curtis and his wife, Habon, have three children, Steven, Cydney, and Ayaan. He lives in Detroit, Michigan, with his family.
