Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Children’s picture books

JOY TAKES ROOT

Ashleigh Corrin Gwendolyn Wallace

In her grandmother's garden, a young girl learns about mindfulness and herbal medicine in this soothing intergenerational story about our connection to nature.

It's Joy's first summer in her grandmother's garden - a rite of passage. In the midst of okra, spinach, and strawberries, Grammy teaches Joy that plants are friends with many uses. Herbs, for example, can be turned into medicine.

There in Grammy's abundant backyard, Joy learns to listen for the heartbeat of the earth and connect it to her own as she takes deep breaths and puts her intentions into the soil. By the story's end, she learns to grow seeds in her own garden, honoring all that her grandmother taught her. With sensory-rich illustrations from award-winning illustrator Ashleigh Corrin, Joy Takes Root is a blissful reminder of all that might bloom.

Gwendolyn Wallace graduated from Yale in 2021 and currently works for the International African American Museum. A budding herbalist, her debut children's book Joy Takes Root was inspired by her own experiences gardening with her grandmother in South Carolina.

Ashleigh Corrin is a graphic designer by day, illustrator by night. Her talent comes from her late grandmother, who inspired Ashleigh to serve people's unique stories with creativity. With her illustrations, she hopes to contribute to good laughs, nostalgia, vulnerability, transparency, and seeing the light in ourselves and others.

Available products
Book Published 2023-06-20 by Kokila
Book Published 2023-06-20 by Kokila

Comments

This contemplative portrayal of a Black grandmother and granddaughter bonding over their mutual love of gardening and the outdoors is both rare and welcome. In Corrin's expansive and colorful illustrations, the heavy use of the color green, including on Grammy's gardening apron, emphasizes the characters' love of nature and how nature embraces them, too. A quiet, thoughtful tale that promotes mindfulness, intentionality, gratitude, and connection.

Making her picture book debut, Wallace centers a Black-presenting family's time gardening together as a means of looking forward and back.Moving...Textural hand-drawn and digital illustrations by Corrin highlight the garden in colorful detail, showing fruitful connections via images of a bumble bee perched on a squash blossom and of Joy, seated on the globe, resting her hand on the earth. It's a reap-what-you-sow telling that considers what's been given and what's yet to come.

A beautiful ode to both the natural world and intergenerational cultural wisdom that imbues the sequential steps of planting a garden with a deeply felt spirituality. Grammy's reverence for the garden is grounded in both her labor over the land and the miracle of growth that comes from it. The mixed media art captures that balance with an exquisitely joyful style, sometimes integrating Grammy and Joy into a world of flourishing vegetation, and other times focusing on their interactions with nature. Textures are richly varied with watercolor-like dappling, stamp-like outlines, and rich saturation; hues are appropriately verdant with radiant pops of color throughout.