By Jacqueline Woodson
One warm day, a girl and her grandmother get up early, ride the bus for hours, and go to visit her daddy in prison.
It's visiting day, and the whole house is buzzing before the sun's up. Grandma fries chicken and packs it careful, does the girl's hair just so, and puts on her good dress, because today is the one day this month they get to see Daddy. They ride a bus a long, long way with other families dressed up the same. And only slowly, through a child's own loving eyes, does it come clear where they're going: Daddy is in prison, and he's counting down the days too. Jacqueline Woodson never once makes it grim. The book is soaked in love, the love of a grandmother, the ache and the joy of a daddy waiting on the other side of the glass, a family that stays a family across the distance.
For a child being raised by a grandparent while a parent is away, or in prison, this book says the thing that's hardest to say: you can love someone completely and still only see them once a month, and that love still counts. Woodson trusts a child to hold both the joy and the missing at the same time. And she centers the tenderness, the getting ready, the reunion, the going home, so a child comes away feeling their family is whole, not broken.