The Watcher

  When the chaos of life threat­ens to over­take your soul, a sim­ple psalm can soothe you. In this pic­ture book, Wilder Award-win­ning author Grimes deliv­ers a com­pact yet pow­er­ful mes­sage of hope and encour­age­ment based on Psalm 121. Short poems ener­gized with kind­ness, despair, hope, regret, and accep­tance are deliv­ered using a style she describes in the back of the book as “the gold­en shov­el,” a form she also used in One Last Word (2017). Grimes defines this form as using a por­tion of an exist­ing poem and arrang­ing it in such a way that the end words of each line form a short sen­tence from the orig­i­nal poem. Using the words from the psalm, woven with care­ful­ly craft­ed words of her own, she tells the sto­ry of Jor­dan and Tanya, two ele­men­tary school chil­dren strug­gling with fit­ting in, try­ing to sur­vive. Tanya, a black girl, stut­ters and com­pen­sates with mean­ness; while Jor­dan, a shy and qui­et white boy, just wants to make a friend. Tanya feels the con­stant brunt of oth­er’s lack of com­pas­sion and directs that anger toward Jor­dan. Col­lier’s exquis­ite art­work com­bines soft, del­i­cate brush strokes with live­ly pho­to col­lages. The effect is both hyper-real­is­tic and gauzi­ly sur­re­al, a per­fect com­ple­ment to Grimes’ poems. A sump­tu­ous work filled with a deli­cious­ly wrapped cen­ter — per­fect for class­rooms, school, pub­lic, or church libraries, or home: wher­ev­er hearts go for mend­ing. (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)