Jane and her friends have their electronic summer all planned out—movies, YouTube, and video games—until Jane’s parents ruin everything with their dorky Great American Road Trip. Disappointed, frustrated, Jane says goodbye to her friends on the last day of school. As the trip begins, Jane’s nose is in her iPad. She fails to appreciate the manatees at Everglades National Park and the Mark Twain lookalike riverboat captain on the Mississippi.
The next stop, however, is Big Bend National Park, where Jane is impressed by the Texas night sky. A “meteor shower lit up the sky like fireworks,” Jane says, “brighter than any screen I had ever seen.” Jane and her family go on to play astronauts in the desert, tightrope walkers at Grand Canyon National Park, and cowboys at Yosemite National Park, where El Capitan makes Jane feel “really small but really great, too, like I was part of something big.”
Our Great Big Backyard by Laura Bush and Jenna Bush Hager is a sweet celebration of America’s National Park Service, which observes its centennial anniversary in August 2016. This book encourages a love for, and pride in, the nation’s most valuable assets, and inspires children to get out from behind their devices and explore the outdoors.
Jacqueline Rogers’s pen, ink, watercolor, gouache, and marker illustrations are a cute accompaniment to the simple text. She includes playful elements that adults will appreciate as well, such as the “43” stenciled on Dad’s golf bag. Especially heartwarming are Baxter the beagle, who appears in every illustration, and the stowaway chipmunk who hitches a ride in the family’s minivan. The front and back endpapers are a colorful map of the United States depicting the route of the family’s road trip and the locations of the national park sites they visited.
Our Great Big Backyard includes a helpful appendix with a comprehensive list of National Park Service sites in the United States, listed by state or territory, proving that there are, indeed, “cool places in your own backyard.” For more information and to plan your own Great American Road Trip, please visit www.findyourpark.com. Happy summer, y’all!
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