DADDY CALLS ME MAN

This story from Johnson (The Rolling Store, p. 300, etc.) consists of four short verses (""Big Shoes,"" ""Spin,"" ""Noah's Moon,"" and ""Baby Sister"") about the happy home life of a young African-American boy. Family love and the shared stories and symbols that connect the generations are pervasive themes (as they are in all of Johnson's works); Mitchell embodies these themes in vivid oil illustrations by showing the boy narrator as the child of artists and introducing each of his poems with one of the parents' paintings. In the last spread, readers see the paintings hanging on the wall of the family's home studio. This may be a book to pair with Peter Catalanotto's The Painter (1995), for two glimpses of the lives of artists.