Rosa (by Nikki Giovanni)

Traveling home from work on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, AL, African-American Rosa Parks is ordered by the driver to give up her seat to a white passenger. Sitting in the neutral section between the white and black sections of the bus, Mrs. Parks refuses to get up. The driver calls the police, and Mrs. Parks is arrested. When word spreads about her act of defiance, other community leaders get together to organize a boycott of the buses until the segregation is ended. Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., blacks in Montgomery refuse to ride the buses for almost a year, until finally they achieve their goal.

It's easy to see why ROSA won both the Coretta Scott King Award and a Caldecott Honor -- the illustrations are spectacular. Bold yet detailed, they show Rosa Parks as she was -- not an old lady too tired to get up, but a strong young woman tired of oppression. In paintings that combine watercolor and collage,  realistic images of people are set against slightly abstract backgrounds with skewed perspectives. The pictures radiate heat, light, and power.

Poet Nikki Giovanni's text is at times preachy, however, and Parks is portrayed as perhaps more than a mere mortal -- at times Bryan Collier's art suggests a halo above her. Though the book is aimed at 4- to 8-year-olds, some of the story will go over their heads, and many things are unexplained. What is the NAACP? What happened to Parks after the police came? There is a vivid picture of a cop confronting her, but her actual arrest is not mentioned. And she virtually disappears from the book halfway through. Various news events, such as the lynching of Emmet Till and freeing of his killers, are mentioned but not explained; an author's note would have been welcome. These events can be used as openings for parents to discuss them in more detail with their kids, but the book on its own may be confusing. Still, this is a gorgeously illustrated introduction to a watershed event.