Visiting Day

Visiting Day, by Jacqueline Woodson

This is the story of a young African American girl and her grandmother. As the story opens, we see the girl and her grandmother preparing to go and visit daddy in a place where, as the grandmother describes lightly to her granddaughter, he is "doing a little time." The illustrations in this story were beautiful, very realistic, and I was touched to see how happy both the father and his daughter were when she visited him. I picked this book out on my own, and I don't know if it could truly be challenged or deemed as controversial, but the one thing I picked a little bit up on was the fact that the family was African American, so it could almost be considered a slur to SES that the man is black and in prison. Also, while this book shows that all families are different, I felt as though it wasn't particularly right to show being in prison in a light manner, as if life is not as bad as it seems even if you commit a crime.