By Angela Johnson
The morning a family leaves their city apartment for good, told in a small child's voice, all the goodbyes before the moving truck pulls away.
It's the leaving morning. A young child and an older sibling press their cold lips to the frosty apartment window, watching for the movers. Then the day fills with goodbyes, to the cousins, to the doorman, to the neighbors, to the man at the store who always knew their order, to the crossing guard, to the apartment itself with its familiar cracks and corners. The movers carry the boxes down. The rooms go empty and echoey. And at the end, the family piles into the car and drives away toward a new home, carrying the goodbyes with them. Angela Johnson's words are spare and quiet; David Soman's warm watercolors fill in everything around them, the busy building, the mother's pregnant belly, the faces of everyone being left behind.
If your child is sad to leave and needs to see that the sad is normal and shared, this is the book. Johnson doesn't dress the move up as an adventure or hurry the child toward the new house. She just honors the goodbyes, one by one, in a small honest voice, and lets the family drive away together at the end, intact and okay. It's a warm, unhurried mirror for a young child, and one of the few moving books that centers a Black family living an ordinary, tender family day, so a child can see themselves right there on the page.