4/1/2016
"Last Stop of Market Street" by Matt de la Peña
Copyright 2016, 32 pages
Realistic Fiction

Cover image taken from Goodreads

First of all, the illustrations are adorable. I love the simple shapes, the bright colors, and the cartoonish-but-still-human-like characters. I also like how it represents quite a bit of underrepresented people. My favorite is the guy with tattoos in the bus. We totally don't see a lot of those in children's books even if in real life we see tattooed people in a daily basis. There's also the blind man with his guide dog. How many of these people we see in children's books? Matt's story-telling is also beautiful. It's a simple read, but still poetic. I'm one of those people that would fail to appreciate a children's book if they're more of a practice material than a written motion picture. Not that I don't believe we don't need basal books, but still. I suppose I'm too adult by now.

Anyway. As I browsed through the web to find this book's cover image, I stumbled across about a thousand other reviews. One that stood out to me reads something like: "Nana is teaching CJ to put on a rosy-colored glass, silver-lining the fact that they're poor and live in a dumpster. CJ should learn to pick up that trash instead of walking on it". In a way, I can't disagree. There's indeed a little bit (okay, a lot) of silver-lining going on. But I suppose that reviewer missed one crucial point: neither CJ nor Nana chose to live where they live now. Knowing how things are in the real world, they probably can't move to a suburban house at the snap of a finger either. In fact, they probably don't have much option beside staying. Nana never said "don't ever leave this neighborhood" or "this is the best place on Earth". Her point is that while they're there, in that moment, let's not complain about not having a car or a fancy iPod. Let's not complain about why everything always looks "so dirty". Just because they don't have a brand new car, a manicured lawn or a white picket fence, doesn't mean they have to sit there and be miserable. Life can be beautiful wherever you live if you adjust your lenses just right. Is that silver-lining? Maybe. Is it bad? Maybe. But either or, there's no bad thing about learning how to shift your perspective so the world is what you make of it.