Feathers (Puffin Books 2007) is a quiet book packed with the power of hope.  You know hope–the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.  Jacqueline Woodson weaves this snippet of poetry from Emily Dickinson throughout Frannie’s story, and in reading it, I find that hope is weaving its way into my thinking, too.

Frannie has much to hope for–or worry about–that snowy winter in the 1970s when she is eleven.  Mean girls make fun of her older brother Sean because he is deaf.  Her mother is pregnant, and everyone worries she might lose this baby, too.  At school, a new boy–a white boy–moves into her class and challenges all of them to reconsider who belongs. She doesn’t hold go much to church, but her best friend Samantha sees Jesus in the new boy.

Through it all, Frannie thinks and thinks and thinks.  Woodson’s lyrical prose doesn’t provide all the answers for faith and family and friendship life and death and racism, but her words do sing with hope.