Carole Boston Weatherford, a New York Times best-selling
author and poet, was named the 2025 Children’s Literature Legacy
Award winner. She was also named the 2019 Washington Post
Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award winner. Her numerous books
for children include the Newbery Honor Book Box: Henry Box Brown
Mails Himself to Freedom, illustrated by Michele Wood; the Coretta
Scott King Author Award winner Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race
Massacre, illustrated by Floyd Cooper; the Robert F. Sibert Honor
Book Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights
Movement, illustrated by Ekua Holmes; and the critically acclaimed
Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library and Outspoken: Paul Robeson,
Ahead of His Time, both illustrated by Eric Velasquez. Carole
Boston Weatherford lives in Maryland.
Michele Wood is an illustrator, painter, filmmaker, and
designer with a master’s in divinity from Christian Theological
Seminary. She has won numerous awards for her illustration work,
including a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award, as well as a
nomination for an NAACP Image Award. Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself
to Freedom is her first book with Candlewick Press. She lives in
Indianapolis, Indiana.
Brown's story never gets old, and this illustrated biography is
rich in context and detail that make it heavier on history and
better for slightly older readers than, for instance, Ellen Levine
and Kadir Nelson's Henry's Freedom Box (2007). Heartbreaking and
legendary.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
A powerful assortment of colors, textures, and artistic styles
illustrate this true story of how Henry “Box” Brown escaped
enslavement in 1849 via a harrowing journey inside a sealed
crate...His traumatic, stifling two-day journey (“Baggage”) from
Virginia to Philadelphia occurs over several claustrophobic
spreads. Elaborate mixed-media collages by Wood (Clap Your Hands)
employ a box motif, featuring Escher-like cubes alongside folded
paper and painted quilt squares. A timeline, notes, and
bibliography conclude this rich retelling of Brown’s courageous
escape.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
An artful and introspective retelling of the life of a remarkable
man and a painful era in U.S. history. Weatherford’s text paired
with Wood’s illustrations combine to offer a memorable work of
nonfiction.
—School Library Journal (starred review)
Weatherford’s moving, poetic verse gives the story a very personal
tone as the reader becomes immersed in Brown’s harrowing tale of
loss and sorrow and his determination to be free...The mixed-media
art uses collage elements effectively. Deep reds and bright blues
and greens figure prominently, giving the art a somewhat vintage
feel while still being vivid and vibrant. The book ends powerfully
with a poem titled “AXIOM”: “Freedom / Is / Fragile. / Handle /
With / Care.”
—The Horn Book (starred review)
Alongside Weatherford’s spare verses, Wood’s paintings fairly
explode with vivid visual motifs of quilts and confinement, with
thickly brushed images rigidly squeezed and folded within borders
that strain to hold them...Middle grade- and school readers are at
an ideal age to begin unpacking Brown’s story, and the harmonious
interplay of word and image will invite youth with strong
preference for either literary or visual formats to join in common
discussion of the concept of freedom.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)
Mixed-media illustrations combine thickly textured figures and
backgrounds, collage, and painted, folded paper to create images
with three-dimensional qualities. As the illustrator says in her
note, the pictures convey deep suffering, hope, and determination.
Cubic shapes appear frequently, echoing and amplifying the six
lines of each poem. Intended for older readers than Henry's Freedom
Box (2007), the book artfully expresses difficult truths while
being mindful of a child audience.
—Booklist
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