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Show Way has received the following starred reviews:
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Booklist A Show Way is a quilt with secret meanings, and the image works as both history and haunting metaphor in this exquisite picture book. Based on Woodson's history, the unforgettable story tells of African American women across generations, from slavery and the civil rights movement to the present. The cut-out jacket design is impressive, as is Talbott's mixed-media artwork inside, which extends Woodson's clear poetic narrative with beautiful collages that makes use of big triangles, squares, and curves to emphasize portraits and landscapes and show connections and courage. The first double-page spread is of anguished separation when Soonie's great-grandmother , 7, is sold "without her ma or pa." Growing up on a plantation in South Carolina, Soonie learns from Big Mama about children "growing up and getting themselves free," and also how to sew quilts with signs that show the way to freedom. Time passes: Soonie's granddaugther, Georgiana, has twin girls who march for freedom in the 1960's. The final glorious spread shows Georgiana's granddaugther, Jacqueline Woodson, laughing at home with her own beloved daugther, Toshi Georgiana, whose picture is embedded in the long quilt that connects her with those who came before. A must for the classroom, this will move many readers to explore their own family roots; link it to the booklist interview with Woodson [BKL Feb 1 2005], in which she talks about what she owes to those who came before her..
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Publishers
Weekly This affecting, poetic paper-over-board picture book stands out from the first glance. On the innovative cover, a montage of black-and-white pictures of African-American captives, arranged to resemble a quilt, act as a background to a diamond-shaped die-cut opening that frames the image of an African-American girl holding a lighted candle. Woodson's (Coming on Home Soon) story, both historical and deeply personal, begins as a seven-year-old girl is sold into slavery and taken to a South Carolina plantation "without her ma or pa but with some muslin her ma had given her." There she learns to "sew colored thread into stars and moons and roads that slave children grew up and followed late in the night, a piece of quilt and the true moon leading them." Later, her daughter also stitches quilts that become "a Show Way" to guide captives escaping to freedom. The quilt becomes a metaphor not only for physical freedom but for freedom of expression. Long after emancipation, subsequent generations of women in this family stay connected through quilting, using needle and thread as a means of support and as a creative outlet. Woodson eventually reveals that this is her own lineage, and "(her) words became books that told the stories of many people's Show Ways." Talbott uses the quilt motif in rousing ways, piecing together quotes or news items for a pair of spreads about one generation "walking in line to change the laws" as well in softly quilted patterns that tie together the love of a child, a theme throughout this elegantly designed volume. Ages 5-up.
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Kirkus
Reviews Show Ways are quilts with secret meanings - guides to freedom. In this beautiful volume, quilts are the connecting threads of the generations, from Soonie's great-grandmother, sold away from her Virginia home as a girl of seven, to Soonie's great-granddaugther Toshi, Woodson's daugther. It's a celebration of mothers - all of those strong women through the generations who "loved those babies up." Gorgeous multimedia art includes watercolors, chalk and fabric, photographs incorporated into original art and joyous watercolor figures jumping broom. Patchwork and crazy quilts are two common motifs used, the latter, with jagged stitching resembling railroad tracks, representing the harshest of times. Whether quilts were actual maps to freedom or such stories are simply folklore, quilts are a perfect device to portray the generations of a family. Like Deborah Hopkinson's Sweet Clara and the Freeom Quilt (1993) and Under the Quilt of Night (2001) and Doreen Rappaport's Freedom River (2000), this takes a difficult subject and makes it accessible to young readers. One of the most remarkable books of the year. (Picture book. 5+)
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