Feathers

Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson is another 2008 Newbery Honor book. In it, we meet Frannie, a sixth grade girl growing up in the early seventies with a loving father whose work takes him away for days at a time, a fearful mother who worries about her unborn child, a religious grandmother who uses the Bible to lovingly discipline her grandchildren, and a deaf brother who taught her about the world of words. One day a white boy enters her all-black classroom on the all-black side of the highway, and changes the assumptions she and her classmates had about their world. Through conversations with her family, her best friend Samantha, and the new boy referred to as Jesus Boy, Frannie learns that not only is hope a thing with feathers, as in the Emily Dickinson poem, but “every moment . . . is a thing with feathers.”