Henry's Freedom Box; A True Story from the Underground Railroad by Ellen Levine 
VS. 
Journey by Aaron Becker

Mrs. Holden and Grade 4-2 (We read these together as our introduction to mini-mighty smackdown).

Summary: Both of these books are Caldecott Honor Winners. They are two completely different picture books. Henry's Freedom Box is a story about slavery and the awful things that happened to families because of slavery. Henry's story is very heartbreaking but he tries to find the good in the bad. Journey is a wordless picture book so we have to work harder as the reader to figure out what is going on. From the first page it is easy to see that the main problem is that the girl is sad and lonely. She wants someone to play with her but everyone in her family is busy. She creates her own adventure using her imagination and we found many similarities between this book and others such as Where The Wild Things Are, and Harold And The Purple Crayon. We noticed that the author/illustrator used bright colours to represent whimsical/playful things such as a kite, a ball, a scooter, sidewalk chalk, etc. 

Winner: Journey 16/22 students chose this as the winning book. The reason why we liked this book so much is because the girl has a wild imagination and it shows us all the wonderful things you can do when you use your imagination. The author/illustrator did an amazing job of showing us rather than telling us this story. The pictures are full of detail and he creates suspense by adding in obstacles that the girl has to overcome. At one point we wondered if she would ever be able to leave the colourful world. Aaron Becker also does a great job of showing the characters' emotions in his drawings. We would highly recommend this book to others. We give it a rating of 10/10 overall.