There's a fluid interchange between sadness and joy that we too seldom recognize. Fully expressing sadness can even surprisingly release joy, as Danté Plays His Blues shows.
The book starts smack in the middle of an unwanted move. Danté and his mother head in his Uncle Ron's truck to live with his uncles and cousin, far from his neighborhood and friends.
But Danté hears music through the window and finds his uncles practicing saxophone and guitar for their band. He learns that "Music is in our family" and gets to try out an old golden sax, which Uncle Ron starts teaching him to play.
Danté names the sax "Luna" after their old house in Luna Park — a place he still misses terribly. His Uncle Joe picks up on his case of the blues and shouts, "Turn yo' blues into yo' muse."
And so begins a transformation in which Danté literally breathes into his sadness, by the breath required to play the sax. Shamar Knight-Justice's mixed-media illustrations reveals the complexity of this change: The depth of concentration on Danté's face, musical scores rippling along the arms of his shirt, a ribbon of blue-black scrolling across the page. The art in this book is so exquisite — as is its theme — that we'd have a hard time limiting it to its suggested reading age, four to nine years old.
Author Allen R. Wells dedicates this book "To the kids and families faced with home insecurities. To my beautiful people of Jackson, Mississippi, and to all those people who love unconditionally." He is also the author of It's Pride, Baby! and Yvonne Clark and Her Engineering Spark. When he isn’t writing, he’s trekking around the world, designing building engineering systems.
