Before She Was My Grandmother
by Giselle Potter; illus. by the author
Primary    Enchanted Lion    52 pp.
8/25    9781592704316    $19.99

A young girl is always glad to visit her grandmother, Alice: “She makes me feel important when she looks into my eyes and listens carefully to everything I have to say.” Her favorite moments come when Alice tells stories from her childhood, enhanced by her memory box and its menagerie of belongings: shells she collected from shorelines when she couldn’t go swimming, the watercolor set with which she painted her garden, a walnut-shell owl her little sisters gave her before she left for a hospital in Switzerland for “children just like her” (she used a wicker wheelchair, and transitioned to “special shoes” by the time she returned home). Potter’s lush watercolor illustrations showcase the natural beauty surrounding Alice in her youth, from her beloved garden to the serene Swiss hospital, with occasional glimpses into her imagination, where deer antlers grow taller than trees and her walnut owl sails the world in a seashell boat. Young Alice resembles illustrations of the eponymous lead of Carroll’s Wonderland books, a loving implication that the narrator considers her grandmother as fascinating a heroine as any from fiction. For young readers, the story is a gentle encouragement to listen when beloved elders share tales of their upbringing, but there’s equal depth present for adults, who know the likelihood of there being sadder moments in Alice’s childhood carefully elided in the retelling. Every trial is immediately followed by a reassurance or a silver lining: a subtle, heartwarming representation of the caring grandmother that Alice—implied by the book’s title and identified in the dedication as Potter’s own—will someday become.

From the September/October 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.