Get the Best Gifts for Dad in Time With Store Pick-Up Shop Father's Day

Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?

Add to Wishlist

Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?

Hardcover

$18.99

View All Available Formats & Editions

Hardcover
$18.99

View All Available Formats & Editions

SHIP THIS ITEM

Qualifies for Free Shipping
PICK UP IN STORE
Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Available within 2 business hours

Want it Today?
Check Store Availability

Related collections and offers

Want it Today?
Check Store Availability

Overview

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2023

Based on the viral poem by Coretta Scott King honoree Junauda Petrus, this picture book debut imagines a radically positive future where police aren’t in charge of public safety and community well-being.

Petrus first published and performed this poem after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. With every subsequent police shooting, it has taken on new urgency, culminating in the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, blocks from Junauda's home.

In its picture book incarnation, Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers? is a joyously radical vision of community-based safety and mutual aid. It is optimistic, provocative, and ultimately centered in fierce love. Debut picture book artist Kristen Uroda has turned Junauda's vision for a city without precincts into a vibrant and flourishing urban landscape filled with wise and loving grandmothers of all sorts.

Product Details
About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593462331
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	437,432
Product dimensions:	10.94(w) x 9.31(h) x 0.35(d)
Lexile:	AD900L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Junauda Petrus is a writer, pleasure activist, filmmaker and performance artist, born on Dakota land of Black-Caribbean descent. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. Her debut novel, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, earned a Coretta Scott King honor. She lives in Minneapolis with her wife and family.

Kristen Uroda is an artist best known for her vibrant, joyful illustrations. Often softly formed yet boldly colored, her work aims to express beauty in the ordinary moments, celebrate the poetry within diverse faces and figures, and tell stories that inspire reflection and social and civic change. While her career started in editorial illustration, she has most recently moved into narrative illustration with her first picture book. She is currently based in her hometown of Detroit, Michigan.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/01/2023
Lush, luminous, and celebratory, the words and images of this poem turned picture book offer a powerful meditation on intergenerational bonds and community care. In jewel-bright illustrations, Uroda interprets Petrus’s vision of grandmothers as peacekeepers who drive “badass” classic cars, play “old-school jams” including Patti LaBelle and Stevie Wonder, and who—in response to trouble—“will pick you up swiftly in their sweet rides and look at you until you catch shame,” then “ask you if you are hungry.” In this moving portrait of a precinct-free world, there are, instead, “just love temples with spaces to meditate and eat delicious food.” There, grandmas, who help with homework and pass on various lessons, ensure that “All the hungry bellies will know warmth. All the children will expect love.” Sun-splashed and star-strewn scenes depict a brown-skinned cast of grandmothers, who present across ages and gender expressions, capturing the vivacious energy of elders “comfortable in loving fiercely” that’s reflected in the language’s soaring weightlessness. Ages 4–8. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

★ "A reverie of a book, offering criticism delivered with honey about our current state of affairs. It’s not at all as far-fetched as it sounds."—School Library Journal, starred review

★ “Lush, luminous, and celebratory, the words and images of this poem turned picture book offer a powerful meditation on intergenerational bonds and community care. [With] jewel-bright illustrations…this moving portrait of a precinct-free world…[capture] the vivacious energy of elders “comfortable in loving fiercely” that’s reflected in the language’s soaring weightlessness.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

★ "Unconditional love and community-based care lay at the heart of this radical and linguistically delicious picture book that invites conversations about relationships in communities of color. Uroda’s luminous illustrations capture the verve, courage, and sensuality of grandmas (who sometimes look like grandpas—a nod to gender inclusivity and complex grand-families); the richness of Black and brown communities; and the resources they possess to heal their own wounds."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2023
K-Gr 4—The theory behind this idyllic book is that grandmothers can handle it. "If you up to mischief, they will pick you up swiftly in their sweet rides and look at you until you catch shame./ She will ask you if you are hungry and you say yes and of course you are." The squad cars are cool, and the grandmothers—here Black and brown women with white hair and large hats, acquainted with Civil Rights icons as well as what troubles young hearts—have tables where good food fills up hungry stomachs, and any wildness is taken apart with love and understanding. "The grandmas are the original warriors, wild since birth, loving fiercely./ They have fought so you don't have to,/ Not in the same ways, at least." There will be no precincts, nor will there be arrest records, incarceration instead of reason, and the wholesale condemning of children's souls to a system that controls through fear. Watercolorlike illustrations in close to neon shades show city scenes and a wide array of humanity, some of whom are using wheelchairs, some skipping along. Overhead shots of a table laden with food to fill up bellies till the "soul arrives" demonstrates the connection between want and the breaking down of law. Homage to historic leaders blends as smoothly as the colors of the rainbow-filled scenes, paving the way for readers to conclude that the humor of the title has wisdom as well. VERDICT A reverie of a book, offering criticism delivered with honey about our current state of affairs. It's not at all as far-fetched as it sounds.—Kimberly Olson Fakih

School Library Journal

★ 2023-01-12
This picture book based on Petrus’ poem, written in the wake of the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, asks: What if grandmothers replaced the police who patrol American neighborhoods?
Petrus and Uroda paint a lively, upbeat, attitude-filled portrait of matriarchs cruising neighborhoods in “badass” vintage squad cars, playing awesome Afrocentric music, and picking up kids getting up to no good. A grandma peering over her glasses can make a kid “catch shame,” and rather than locking them up, grandmas would take kids home, feed them, cook and meditate with them, help them with homework, and love them up. Taking readers into Black kitchens, gardens, bedrooms, and other loving spaces, this book offers a village solution to raising Black children that excludes incarceration. In one scene, a white-haired grandmother with brown skin gazes into the eyes of a brown-skinned child wearing a colorful head wrap, and as she holds the child’s cheeks, she acknowledges “the light in you with no hesitation” because “she loves you fiercely forever.” Unconditional love and community-based care lie at the heart of this radical and linguistically delicious picture book that invites conversations about relationships in communities of color. Uroda’s luminous illustrations capture the verve, courage, and sensuality of grandmas (who sometimes look like grandpas—a nod to gender inclusivity and complex grand-families); the richness of Black and brown communities; and the resources they possess to heal their own wounds. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A refreshing homage to the power of intergenerational relationships and potent alternative to policing. (Picture book. 7-14)

Kirkus Reviews

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews