By Vera B. Williams
A girl, her mother and her grandmother drop their coins in a jar for a year, because after the fire they have nowhere soft to sit.
There is a huge glass jar on a shelf in Rosa's kitchen, and everything goes in it. Her mother comes home from waiting tables at the Blue Tile Diner and tips her coins in. Rosa helps at the diner and puts her own money in. Grandma puts in whatever she saves by finding a bargain. They are saving for one specific thing: a big, soft, wonderful armchair, the kind you sink into. They need it because a year ago there was a fire, and their old home and every single thing in it burned, and the neighbors came the next day carrying a table and a bed and a rug so the family had something. Nobody brought a comfortable chair. So the jar fills up, slowly, for a year. Then the three of them roll the coins, carry them to the bank, change them for bills, and go shopping together.
Every other saving-up book treats money as a choice a child makes. This one shows you where the money actually came from, and that changes everything. It came from a woman on her feet all day, in coins, in tips, a handful at a time, for a year. Williams paints it in warm reds and blues with a border round every page, so it looks like a folk painting of a life, and it never once asks you to pity this family. They are not sad. They are working toward a chair. The fire is the reason for the jar and it takes one spread, told in the past, everyone safely out. What stays with a child is the jar: the sheer patience of it, and the fact that a mother and a grandmother and a girl all put money in the same one.