All the Places We Call Home

PreS-Gr 2–With bright vibrant patterns and dreamlike layering of drawings paired with poetic dialogue and narrative description, words and art set the scene for a mother and daughter bedtime story with a gentle dose of geography and genealogy. With hair braids with pink barrettes and green pajamas, an African American girl prepares to go to bed and spins a globe. She asks her mother, with natural hair in a headband and blue nightie, “Where shall we go?” and then visits her mother’s hometown in South Africa. This question is repeated throughout as the daughter asks to visit different women of the family and their homes (rural and urban). There are roughly 30 words per spread paired with a drawing of the mother and daughter in real life and the daughter dreaming in vibrant clouds of the places the mother is describing to her: the daughter’s birth in South Africa, her mother’s childhood at her grandmother’s house in Jamaica, and her great-grandmother’s house in Zimbabwe. The book deftly handles geography, matrilineal heritage, and African American heritage under a guise of a spin of a globe and a bedtime story.