Joy Takes Root

Making her picture book debut, Wallace centers a Black-presenting family’s time gardening together as a means of looking forward and back. “The most important thing to remember,” Grammy tells young Joy as they together tour Grammy’s expansive South Carolina garden, “is that plants are our friends and our family.” Pointing out all of the flora she cultivates, Grammy next offers up information about herbs’ medicinal properties and teaches Joy how to plant seeds of her own. A moving series of spreads observes Grammy paying homage to the family’s ancestors—“the ways they took care of this same soil” and the way their love is ready to be passed on—before inviting Joy to both “put our intention into the soil” and consider how “each drop of water holds the memories of all the water before it.” Textural hand-drawn and digital illustrations by Corrin (Layla’s Happiness) highlight the garden in colorful detail, showing fruitful connections via images of a bumble bee perched on a squash blossom and of Joy, seated on the globe, resting her hand on the earth. It’s a reap-what-you-sow telling that considers what’s been given and what’s yet to come. Ages 4–8. Author’s agent: Wendi Gu, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. Illustrator’s agent: Nicole Geiger, Full Circle Literary. (June)