Parents' Guide to

This Is the Rope: A Story From the Great Migration

By Joanna H. Kraus, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 6+

Lyrical story of a rope and one family's migration North.

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Together, author Jacqueline Woodson and illustrator James Ransome have tackled a huge topic and made it accessible for young readers. Woodson uses spare, poetic text to show through a single family how hopes and dreams of a better life drove an estimated 6 million African Americans in the 20th century to leave the rural South for new beginnings in northern cities. And Ransome's oil paintings are realistic yet filled with emotion.

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