The Quiltmaker’s Gift by Jeff Brumbeau

This is anti-materialist propaganda!!! I'm just joking, this was a nice little story about a greedy king who demands more and more presents from everyone in his kingdom, but no matter how many presents he has, he's never happy, hence the constant demand for more. Then one day he sees a quilt this quilt maker gave someone as a present and the person seems pretty happy so he demands that the quilt maker make him a quilt. The quilt maker refuses to do this however and says that she'll only make the king a quilt when he gives his stuff away, then he'll be able to be happy. So the king tries this out. He gives one of his presents to someone and it makes him feel kind of good inside, so he does it again and again. Years later the king is practically poor, but he's smiling a lot and the quilt maker gives the king a quilt. he says he doesn't need the quilt, but the quilt maker gives it to him anyways. The pictures are colourful and expressive and there's a nice moral to the story.

Most Loved in All the World: A Story of Freedom by Tonya Hegamin

This was such a good story. I just flipped through it with the intention of putting it down, but it was really touching. It is a story about a girl and her mother, both of which are slaves at the time of the black slave trade, and the story is told through the eyes of the girl, who is very young and doesn't really grasp the reality of the situation. She just knows that her mother works hard in the fields and that she helps her by rubbing some salve in them at night. Her mother makes quilt patches throughout the story and at the end makes a quilt for her daughter. The story ends with the mother giving the daughter to group of people in the underground railroad so that she'll maybe have a better life somewhere else. It was pretty sad, but good.