Last Stop on Market Street

Every Sunday after church, a boy named CJ and his grandmother, Nana, ride the bus across their city to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and this picture book follows one of those rainy trips start to finish. CJ, tired and a little resentful, asks Nana a string of why questions, why they don't own a car like his friend Colby's family, why the neighborhood on their route looks so different from the one they left, why they have to go help other people at all, and Nana answers each one not by arguing him out of his feelings but by turning his attention outward, to a blind man who reads the world through touch and sound, to a street musician whose guitar CJ learns to hear as its own kind of beautiful, to the soup kitchen's regulars, some of whom CJ already knows by name. By the final stop, Nana has not solved CJ's dissatisfaction so much as widened what he notices, and the book ends with the two of them stepping off the bus into the soup kitchen together, no longer strangers to the people they are there to serve.

Matt de la Peña writes CJ's questions in a child's genuine, unguarded voice, and Christian Robinson's flat, richly colored illustrations carry as much of the story's warmth as the text itself, since the book's real subject, noticing the people and beauty around you rather than what you lack, depends on what a reader sees on the page as much as what CJ says aloud. It reads in a few minutes and rewards a slow, attentive read aloud far more than a quick flip through, the kind of picture book built to be revisited rather than finished once.