October 14, 2025 by Cuento de Luz
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central
The narrator's great-great-grandmother has an idea; she will make a quilt with blocks from the women in the family. These blocks will represent each woman's interest; from shelling peas to flowers to favorite dogs, generations of women lovingly work their favorite things into blocks for the quilt. This work spans generations, and includes blocks from the narrator's mother and aunt, as well as twin cousins. When the quilt ends up with the narrator, he states that even though it was meant for the women in the family, he also wanted to contribute to this multigenerational testament to the bonds of kinship. He learns to sew, and adds a block of his baby daughter to the quilt, which he will pass down to her. The end of the book has a family tree.
Like another title from this publisher, Fran and Zuzanna's The Vase with the Golden Cracks, this book is printed on Stone Paper, which is so smooth and heavy that it almost feels like good quality fabric! It also makes the brilliantly saturated illustrations seem even more vibrant. There's a good feel for the different decades that the women lived in, and the clothes and quilt blocks are very fun.
Modern readers will enjoy the twist with the son wanting to work on the quilt; there are many men involved in the quilting world now, which wasn't necessarily the case fifty years ago.
This would make a great gift for a newborn, along with a memory quilt, and adds to the variety of picture books that feature the power of this art form in connecting generations and memories like Malik's Saif's Special Patches, Rockwell's The All-Together Quilt, Polacco's The Keeping Quilt, Johnston's The Quilt Story, or Bourgeois's Oma's Quilt.
As a quilter, I'm not sure that the author really understands quilts. The dedication thanks her grandmother for knitting, but I can't say I have ever seen a memory quilt with blank spaces left. How do the new blocks get added? Also, on the cover, the quilt is being machine quilted AFTER the binding has been put on. I also had an issue with the narrator getting the quilt. Why didn't his twin cousins? Did they fight too much about it? If it's about connecting the women in the family, it would have made more sense to have them get the quilt. It's a fine story, but like I said... questions.
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