OUR CORNER STORE

This companion volume to Rooster Summer (2018) celebrates the pivotal role a neighborhood grocery store plays in the lives of a brother and sister.

Speaking in verse and using a lively present-tense, first-person plural voice chock-full of sensory vocabulary, the two siblings “crackle-rackle / through the fall leaves” to Mr. Stanstones’ store. There, friendly clerk Bert, who, with “his long apron fluttering / like a huge, crazy, scary bird,” is wont to spring out of the walk-in freezer, playfully surprises them. One memorable day Bert takes them into that big freezer, where sausages dangle like “fat party streamers.” Spying “gleaming high” jars filled with enormous cookies, the siblings “think their yums / would fill our tums.” They “cuddle, cat-chat” with Toby Cat, who lives in the storeroom and surprises them with a “trick and treat” mouse on Halloween. The siblings earn coins for their piggy banks by dusting, stacking cans, “heaping mountain rows” of vegetables, polishing glass (including those cookie jars), and collecting pop bottles. They borrow comic books from the “creaky spin-about racks.” When big superstores force the corner shop to close, Mr. Stanstones gives the siblings the cookie jars. Peppered with vibrant verbal images of a bygone era, bubbly, kid-friendly verses are reinforced by cheery, humorous opaque paint-and–colored-pencil illustrations showing the brother and sister freely roaming their beloved corner store and urban neighborhood. Children, clerks, and shopkeepers are white; the neighborhood is diverse.

A free-spirited, warmly nostalgic vision.