Knock Knock: My Dad’s Dream for Me by Daniel Beaty (review)

A young African-American boy and his father have a morning routine: Papa knocks on the door while son pretends to be asleep, until Dad comes to investigate. “Then I get up and jump into his arms. ‘Good morning, Papa!’” One day, however, the knock never comes; increasingly missing his father as the days go by, the boy writes a letter and leaves it on his desk, pleading for his dad to come home (“Papa, come home, ‘cause I want to be just like you, but I’m forgetting who you are”) and teach him the things he’s not yet learned. Two months later, Papa’s return letter explains that he won’t be coming home and offers his son advice on growing up. Adapted from a piece of spoken-word poetry, the text is both sturdy and expressive (“As you grow older, shave in one direction with strong, deliberate strokes to avoid irritation”), although the tugging at heartstrings seems a little deliberate. Collier’s collage and watercolor illustrations blend realism and the imaginative in a highly textured world—when the boy writes to his father, he’s seen gliding off over the city on a folded paper airplane—and they effectively convey the labor of building after a loss as the boy moves through childhood to adulthood (literally becoming a builder as well as building his own family). The lack of specifics allows the book to reflect parental absence for any number of reasons (travel, incarceration, divorce, etc.) and thus makes this a freer-floating counterpoint to Collins’ wartime-absence story Year of the Jungle (BCCB 10/13). The intimate nature of the text and the detailed visual environment are more suited for close sharing than a storytime, but the book’s versatility suggests that it will see extended use.