EXTRAORDINARY MAGIC

Poems and pictures trace Virginia Hamilton’s family history, childhood, and growth into a writer.

Virginia Hamilton was a MacArthur “Genius” and the first Black author to win the Newbery Medal. Crews wisely avoids introducing her subject as a great writer to picture-book readers unlikely to know her books already, instead focusing on the circumstances that helped to make her one. Hamilton’s ancestors fled slavery for the Ohio countryside, where the family flourished. Her parents nourished their youngest daughter’s imagination, captured in two tender poems. In the first, young Hamilton’s mother transforms a frightening storm into a dance between a tree she dubs Grandmother Lilac and the wind; in the other, her father plays mandolin and tells stories about great Black Americans. Cuddled in between, a poem entitled “Free”—set against a double-page illustration of Hamilton’s bare feet striding confidently through green grass—tells readers “Virginia was free. / To be a dreamer. / To be a wanderer. / To be her own unique self. / Free to be.” When a 9-year-old Hamilton decided to become a writer, “Nobody laughed or said, / ‘You can’t do that.’ ” In poem after poem—all in delicate, unrhymed verse—Crews carefully gives budding writers a role model. The digital illustrations have the look of cut-paper collage, excelling when offering visual metaphors but less effective when depicting narrative.

Both a tribute to Hamilton’s genius and an invitation to those yet to come.