They Were Strong and Good

Robert Lawson tells the story of his own family across several generations, tracing grandparents and parents who crossed the ocean, farmed, sailed and gradually settled into towns across a growing United States. He presents them plainly as decent, hardworking people who accomplished nothing famous, framing the whole project, in his own words, as a tribute to the strong and good and largely unrecorded Americans who built the world he grew up into rather than a history of famous names. His black and white drawings move in a looser, more sketch like style than the more finished drawings he later made for Rabbit Hill, carrying the family through farmhouse kitchens, ship decks and small town streets across roughly a century of change.

It reads as a family album turned into connected chapters, generation following generation rather than a single plot resolving toward an ending, which asks more patience of a young reader than a book built around one clear problem. Parents should know before reading it aloud that two passages, one describing an enslaved child living in the household and another describing a nearby Native American community, use language and framing that read as dismissive and reductive by any current standard, and that later editions have revised some of the specific wording while leaving the accompanying illustrations of those same figures, drawn in caricature, unchanged. That makes it a book better suited to reading alongside an adult willing to talk through those pages than to handing a child to read alone, whatever the medal on its cover.