Is it an extended picture book? is it illustrated poetry? Is it a graphic novel? Ain t Burned All the Bright, illustrated by Jason Griffin and written by Jason Reynolds, is one genre-bending book and one Lisa Meidl certainly thinks qualifies for a Caldecott.
Reynolds’s introspective narrative poem, with a young man at home during quarantine as its speaker, shares the stage with Griffin’s emotive collagelike illustrations done in Moleskine notebooks and reproduced on the pages to make it look like a real teen’s journal. The first-person text is presented in three parts, or “breaths.”