Description:
"I loved Gran's smell, and her warm face when we played touch-your-nose at the gold mirror, and her salty kisses when we sat on Gramps's old army trunk in the attic and listened to the wind sing on the roof." Blind since birth, Louis uses all his senses to love his grandmother and feel her love for him. When she dies and Louis seems to have been forgotten in the family treasure hunt Gran arranged in lieu of a will, he must hold on to his knowledge of her love for him and his memories of her smell--"lilacs, with a whiff of bleach"--and her "molasses voice" to know he could never have been overlooked. It is a lifetime later, when Louis is a grandfather himself, that his conviction is affirmed by his "favorite youngest grandchild's" discovery in Gran's much-loved hickory chair. Nothing is overdone in Lisa Rowe Fraustino's beautiful story that shows the profound power of "blind sight," Gran's term for Louis's ability to "see" so much. And the exquisite paintings, in oils and fabric collage by artist Benny Andrews (Sky Sash So Blue) have a tactile appeal, drawing in the reader to Louis's world, as though we are seeing the way he does. (Ages 6 to 10) --Emilie Coulter
| 
